John & Yoko meet the counterculture

  If popular culture were to make room for saints, John Lennon already would have been canonized. After his murder in 1980, Lennon's legacy expanded -- as a former Beatle, as a solo performer, as a rebel ("nothing to kill or die for"), and as a figure indelibly linked to a period of jarring social upheaval in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

  During this period, Lennon married conceptual artist Yoko Ono. John and Yoko became a thing, a two-person team sharing music, performance art, and unexpected appearances. In 1972, for example, they spent a week co-hosting Michael Douglas's popular daytime TV show. Guests ranged from Chuck Berry to Eldrige Cleaver.

  A new chapter in Lennon's life unfolded after he and Ono chose to live in New York's West Village instead of London. The couple eventually would move to Manhattan's Upper Westside, occupying an apartment in the Dakota, a building already ripe with celebrities: Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, and Roberta Flack lived there. Not bad company.

   When I first started watching One to One: John & Oko,  director Kevin Macdonald's documentary, I was put off. Macdonald, it seemed, had assembled a jumbled collage of news footage, interviews, home movies, photos, and snippets of TV shows that Lennon watched. Nixon, George Wallace, and Charlie Chaplin were among those who hit TV screens with flashbulb pop. 

   But as Macdonald's film progresses, it begins to feel as if chaos might be its point. Macdonald deftly immerses us in the cultural splatter that marked the late '60s and early '70s. The Vietnam War still raged and countercultural figures -- Jerry Rubin turns up as someone Lennon and Ono admired -- suggested that the US was on the verge of a major social change, maybe even a revolution.

    The documentary derives its title from benefit concerts Lennon staged at Madison Square Garden in the summer of 1972 to raise money for mistreated children at Willowbrook, a New York facility for mentally disabled children. Wisely, Macdonald includes plenty of music, linking it to Lennon's growing social awareness. At one point, he organized a concert for John Sinclair, a poet and activist who was serving a 10-year sentence for a marijuana-related offense.

     Considering that Rubin, who died in 1994, eventually became a businessman, you may wonder whether Lennon and Ono weren't too quick to board the activist's hippie ship. But that's the thing, I suppose. In the early '70s, lots of folks were floundering, trying to determine what they believed and in whom they should or could believe.

   Perhaps that's why we see Lennon feeling his way through performance art (Lennon and Ono encamped in their bed), new musical directions, and personal issues (his relationship with his mother). That's not to say that the Beatles didn't produce art-worthy music before Lennon and Ono, but in teaming with Ono, Lennon began to see himself in more expansive ways.

   Snippets from phone calls made to Lennon and Ono crop up. Throughout the film, Ono's assistant tells her about his search for thousands of flies she needed for an art piece; Macdonald also touches on Ono's quest to reunite with the daughter who had been separated from her by her former husband, then a member of a Christian cult.

    Macdonald (One Day in September, The Last King of Scotland) skillfully creates a portrait that revolves around Lennon and Ono while holding up a mirror to the period in which their relationship blossomed.

  One to One can be wobbly, but some wobbles do more than shake you up, they recall a moment when the culture was forming, decomposing, searching, experimenting, finding moments of nobility, and, yes,  making a fool of itself. To quote another movie, everything was happening everywhere and all at once -- or so it seemed, and Lennon and Ono were part of it.