NOWHERE BOY (2009) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Sam Taylor-Wood
Aaron Johnson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Anne-Marie Duff
The early days of John Lennon, as a bespectacled kid in late-'50s Liverpool, shuffling between his caring but straight-laced Aunt Mimi and his caring but unbalanced mother Julia. There's a school suspension relating to a pornographic magazine, and banjo lessons from his mum, and Aunt Mimi buys John his first guitar, and he forms a rock-&-roll band called the Quarrymen, and then Paul and George join the group, and the rest, of course, is history. There's some overdone melodrama here, not that John's life didn't have some of that, but mostly it's a sweetly evocative portrait of the artist as a Beatle-in-the-making. Aaron Johnson effectively captures Lennon in all his funny, arrogant, impish, prickly complexity, and Beatles fans will have a good time picking out incidental references to the songs he'd write later on. Anne-Marie Duff and Kristin Scott Thomas are annoyingly good as the two older women in Lennon's life.
