Nowhere Boy

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You don’t need to know much about The Beatles or John Lennon in particular to watch Sam Taylor-Wood’s Nowhere Boy (Ecosse Films / Icon), a fictionalised account about a period in Lennon’s teenage life that was supposedly significant to his development as a musician and person; in fact if you do, you might be annoyed at how the whole episode has been packaged. Life is never so tidy as it is presented in the movies. The period covers the time Lennon became reacquainted with his mother Julia after a decade of abandonment, during which his Aunt Mimi and her husband have brought him up, and runs up to and includes Julia’s death and funeral. During this time Julia teaches Lennon how to play banjo, involves him with her family life that includes two small daughters (one of whom whose memoirs form the basis for this film – this is the older child, Julia) she had with her de facto husband, and generally introduces Lennon to a different and more carefree way of experiencing life than the boy has known so far from his strait-laced aunt. Lennon ends up transforming from a rebellious teenager with no idea of what to do with himself or why he is angry at everyone and everything to a more purposeful young man who discovers in music an outlet for his artistic talents and his various frustrations.

Aaron Johnson, who plays Lennon, does a sterling job in what is basically a coming-of-age / kitchen-sink drama. He portrays nearly the full range of Lennon’s complex and troubled personality: he is at once sensitive, full of bravado and cheek, boorish, aware of the class differences between himself and his aunt on the one hand and on the other the people he prefers to mix with, and capable of unbelievable cruelty to people who love and support him. Kristin Scott Thomas (Mimi) and Anne-Marie Duff (Julia) are capable actors who, perhaps inevitably in this kind of movie drama, have to fall into the sisterly equivalent of the good cop / bad cop routine: the prim and proper class-conscious Mimi, always looking severely dark and school-marmish, attempts vainly to rein in Lennon from the consequences of what she considers his misdeeds while red-haired free spirit Julia in her bright colours collaborates with her son in actions both know will probably get up Mimi’s nose. You can smell the confrontation between the two women and what they are made to represent in this movie coming from a mile away and when it arrives it’s pretty ugly with Julia’s secrets spilled out in front of her son, already drunk and distraught after trying to get his mother to admit what happened to his father and where he went years ago. After this, the movie’s not too clear on how Lennon makes his peace with his aunt and mother, and there’s a suggestion that he never has the opportunity to renegotiate his relationship with Julia due to her premature death.

Of course while we wait for the showdown to arrive, there is the significant sub-plot of Lennon’s developing interest in music which leads him to form The Quarrymen, which in itself brings him in contact with Paul McCartney (played by Thomas Sangster, who looks almost right for the part) after the latter sees The Quarrymen perform at a fair. The precocious youngster teaches Lennon correct guitar-playing techniques and chords, brings along George Harrison to join the band, and even becomes a brother figure to Lennon when they discover they have a shared experience of the loss or absence of a mother (McCartney informs Lennon that his own mother is dead). This bond is strengthened after Julia’s death and the moment when the two teenagers acknowledge the connection is brief but very moving.

And what about the music, you ask? Well, yes, The Beatles are the proverbial elephant in the room as evidenced by background noises of screaming girls and the opening chord to ‘Hard Day’s Night’ which opens the movie, but the band’s name is never actually mentioned in the movie. Some of Lennon’s music is used in the film and there is also an excerpt of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s ‘I Put A Spell On You’, but the soundtrack is scored in the main by the UK group Goldfrapp.

The movie makes no pretense at being a documentary, or even being all that factual: everything that happens appears compressed into a two-year period when more likely it was spread out over several years. The impression is given that Aunt Mimi and Julia don’t get on well because of Julia’s past behaviour in her marriage to Lennon’s father, and I imagine that a lot of Beatles and Lennon fans will be aghast at the idea of turning Lennon’s childhood and adolescence into a soap opera. Perhaps the two women actually had less influence on Lennon’s life than the film’s premise supposes and other adults most certainly had a role in forming his personality and musical development but when facts and making movie family dramas with emotionally manipulative material clash, I guess it’s generally too bad for the facts.

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