Nowhere Boy tells the story of a young John Lennon

10 April 2012

Sam Taylor Wood’s work in fine art is always a bit international and self-advertisingly universal, which is no bad thing in itself, but for Nowhere Boy, her first feature film, it seems as if she has turned to something very local.

There would be a way of telling the story of John Lennon’s early life that made him seem like a larky kid always on the brink of sainthood, or Yogi-hood, but Taylor Wood has opted for something much more considered and effective. She has made a film about a 15-year-old boy.

Lennon (Aaron Johnson) is living with his aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas) in somewhere called Liverpool in 1955. It’s always fascinating to see how much of a person’s grown-up character exists when they’re that young. With people who turned out famous, the danger with biopics always is that too much wisdom will be backdated. But that doesn’t happen in Nowhere Boy.

Johnson is a vibrant actor and he shows strong feeling in his depiction of a young man who isn’t sure who he belongs to, if anybody ever belongs to anybody. He finds out that his mother Julia lives just up the road and he begins seeing her.

Julia (Anne-Marie Duff) is a bit slack, as we used to say. She likes a ciggie and a drink, a dance, and, I suppose, a fuck, though its clear she wasn’t too clever when it came to looking after young John.

Anyway, he gets involved. And we all get involved. Kristin Scott Thomas is a wonderfully stitched-up and starched Mimi, one of those post-war Northern women who perpetually seemed 20 years older than they were. She gets a degree of displaced frustration into every line.

Anne-Marie Duff, on the other hand, is just a girl who said yes too many times and who allowed everybody else to pay the fines. But you couldn’t help loving her, and John couldn’t either. Duff has incredible power as an actress: she can balance sadness and joy on the turning of a heel, and, watching her as Julia Lennon, you find you are entirely rooting for her without quite knowing why.

Taylor Wood has made a solid, small English film. Time was when it would have made a memorable Wednesday Play. Given that many of the best British screenwriters and directors started in exactly this way, I hope the allusion offers nothing but encouragement. Her film is modest and it benefits from it. It is probably less successful in sourcing Lennon’s rock‘n’roll sensibility than in sourcing his pain, and I found the scenes with the young Paul McCartney (Thomas Sangster) a bit shy-making.

It might simply be that too large a shadow falls over that part of Lennon’s mentality, the part that wrote those songs and changed the world and all that.

As with many a likeable film, the best surprises are the smallest ones. On a day out to the seaside with Julia, young Lennon gets to see the impact his mother can have on a room full of people. She wants to dance. He watches her as if he were looking into a cloud of potential. Aaron Johnson is talented enough to reveal the character’s ill-ease at such a display of sexiness and danger in someone who happens to be your mother, but he’s also thrilled. There is style and subtlety in this film and it makes me look forward to what Sam Taylor Wood does next.

She gently leads us to the heart of something with Nowhere Boy: the experience of loss at the centre of Lennon’s view of the world. More than a decade after his mother’s death, and world famous, Lennon would still be singing a song for her. "Half of what I say is meaningless / But I say it just to reach you / Julia."

Listen to Maggie May - a song from the Nowhere Boy soundtrack here

Released on 26 December

Nowhere Boy
Cert: 15

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