John Lennon moves to New York in the early 1970s looking for a city that matches his politics and his music, and this is the version of him that city produced. Yoko Ono narrates much of it, alongside Elton John, Dick Cavett, photographer Bob Gruen, and members of Elephant's Memory, the band backing Lennon and Ono around town. Geraldo Rivera turns up too, explaining how one of his news reports pushed the couple toward staging the 1972 One to One benefit concert. The film also follows Lennon away from New York and away from Ono, into the Los Angeles stretch he later called his 'lost weekend,' before tracking his return to the city and to Ono, and into fatherhood with son Sean. Activists Rennie Davis, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin appear as the political company Lennon kept, tying his music to the antiwar and counterculture movements of the era. Studio footage and interviews with engineer Roy Cicala and producer Jack Douglas fill in how the records actually got made.