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.

John and Yoko go daytime

In 1972, I was living in New York City. I had a job and a family, and I didn’t have much time for daytime TV. If I ever knew, I’d forgotten that in February of that same year, John Lennon and Yoko Ono spent a week as the principal guests and co-hosts of the Mike Douglas Show, a popular daytime program that originated in Philadelphia. The documentary Daytime Revolution chronicles that week, highlighting how John and Yoko used the show to cast light on what then was dubbed  “the counterculture.” Guests, selected by John and Yoko, included Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, and Ralph Nader. At times, the documentary plays like a greatest hits version of the early 70s counterculture that includes segments in which Chuck Berry — the show’s highlight guest — not only performs Memphis, Tennessee with John but provides unlikely help with a bit on macrobiotic cooking. Hey, seeing is believing. Directed by Erik Nelson, the one-hour and 48-minute documentary can feel oddly dated, which is another way of saying it reflects the odd juxtapositions that sometimes cropped up during the 1970s. Douglas, who sang with an easy-listening voice and who conducted his show with non-confrontational ease, still feels like a strange pairing with John and Yoko. Contemporary interviews offer perspective as Daytime Revolution cements its status as a cultural curio. And, yes, it's moving to watch John, who was 31 at the time, sing Imagination.

The Beatles up close and personal

    I know rock aficionados who approach the Beatles with the kind of parsing skills one expects from Talmudic scholars. These are folks who steep themselves in analysis of the music, the books, and the lore — all things Beatles. 

    And why not? The Beatles were a pop-cultural phenomenon like no other and their music grew and developed in complexity as they became more accomplished and famous. 

    I leave that kind of analysis to rock critics and I look forward to reading what some of them have to say about Peter Jackson's documentary, The Beatles: Get Back. 

   For me,  Jackson has made the perfect movie for anyone who has ever wondered how it would feel to hang out with The Beatles during a recording session. Watch the film and you'll know.

  The nearly eight-hour documentary has been assembled  from 60 hours of footage shot in January of 1969 by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg for the documentary Let It Be, which was 81 minutes long and evidently hasn't been available since 1980.

   Beatles mavens feel free to chime in with more details.

  Jackson's version hints at the dissolution to come, notably George Harrison's discontent with how Paul and John, to a lesser extent, dominate the group's musical decisions. 

    At one point, George says he's leaving the band. 

    When, someone asks. 

     Now, says George as he walks out. (He does return.)

    Yoko Ono almost always can be seen sitting at John's side, even while the group is working. She's either ignored by the others or, at times, becomes the subject of conversation, none of it memorably vicious.

   Mostly, Jackson reveals the stop-start quality the creation process for songs originally meant to be part of a TV concert. They eventually were used in a rooftop concert staged at Apple’s London building, The Beatles' last public performance.

   During their sessions, The Beatles seem most alive when they're playing classic rock tunes -- Blue Suede Shoes, for example. They can sound like the most fantastic bar band imaginable, musicians who share the same fondness for rock and revel in the fun of playing it.

  At times, the movie is ... well ... boring, even a bit infuriating. You want the band to get on with it, to find the focus for their work which Paul acknowledges is missing.

  I'm guessing Jackson knew that he might tax some viewers' patience but he’s taking pains to clarify the difference between creation and performance -- one arduous, repetitive, and frustrating; the other, exhilarating.   

   Beatles enthusiasts will find much to chew over in Jackson's lengthy, fascinating three-part documentary — and I might even return for a second look.

   Several times I thought I’d give up on it. I couldn’t. It was, after all, The Beatles.

   The film is available for viewing on Disney+. 

John Lennon, the early years

A portrait of mother and son.

Last Saturday, John Lennon would have turned 70. Gives you pause, doesn’t it? It’s equally sobering to realize that in December, Lennon will have been dead for 30 years. His assassin, Mark David Chapman, is now 55.

The passage of time doesn’t seem to have dulled interest in Lennon, perhaps because he so deftly presented a variety of faces to the public, many of them driven by irrepressible wit and sustained artistic rebelliousness. And unlike many other pop-world phenoms, Lennon’s musical talents seem to have expanded and deepened as he grew older.

Nowhere Boy, a look at Lennon’s pre-Beatle years in Liverpool, is a welcome but slightly odd addition to Lennon lore. Welcome because it tells one of the less familiar parts of the Lennon story. Odd because it mixes giddy rock energies with serious family drama as it introduces us to a pitched psychological battle between the two most important women in young Lennon’s life. Lennon (Aaron Johnson) lived with his aunt Mimi (Kristen Scott Thomas), but frequently visited his mother (Anne-Marie Duff).

Lennon often found himself at odds with his straitlaced aunt Mimi, particularly after the death of her husband (David Threlfall), an uncle who liked to tipple and who seemed a little too eager to share in Lennon's adolescence. Unlike her sister, Lennon's mother encouraged her son's rebelliousness, and, at least according to this movie, sparked Lennon’s interest in rock. Lennon’s mother, we’re told, first told him that at heart, rock ‘n roll is about sex.

Nowhere Boy is a complicated family story with nuances best discovered in a theater. Know, though, that director Sam Taylor-Wood, working from a script by Matt Greenhalgh, touches the significant points of Lennon’s musical development even as we're immersed in the young man’s fragmented family torments.

I won’t say that Taylor-Wood has solved the problem of how to introduce Lennon landmarks, but they are introduced. We’re witness to Lennon’s introduction to rock ‘n roll; his discovery of Elvis; his acquisition of a first guitar; his early gigs with the “skiffle” group, The Quarrymen; and his eventual departure for the clubs of Hamburg, the cradle where the Beatles really were formed.

Based on a memoir written by Julia Baird, one of Lennon’s half sisters, the gist of the movie presumably rings true, and both Scott Thomas and Duff give fine performances in roles that gradually veer away from the outlines of caricature. Scott Thomas’ Mimi was ferociously responsible; Duff’s Julia was flighty and flirtatious, hovering on the border of inappropriateness, even with the son she obviously adored. It’s as if it took both sisters to make a whole woman.

Johnson manages a neat trick. At times, he looks a bit like Lennon; other times, not so much. But he captures Lennon’s engaging impertinence and budding talent. Equally good is Thomas Brodie Sangster, who plays the young Paul McCartney and in whom we see traces of the soon-to-be-born Beatle.

Of course, the movie is informed by everything that followed in the wake of Lennon’s adolescence, namely the phenomenal rise of the Beatles, but a variety of family photographs – real ones shown with the end credits – are as poignant as anything in the movie. They made me wish that a 70-year-old Lennon were still around to tell us what he thought of those formative Liverpool years.

It’s not only the ascendance of the Beatles, but the loss of Lennon that echoes throughout this small and sometimes telling movie. Maybe that’s why Nowhere Boy's frequent attempts at buoyancy can't entirely mask its deep and underlying sadness.