NOWHERE BOY

(M)
Rating: ***1/2

His Two Cents: Newcomer Aaron Johnson (whom some may have seen in last year’s Angus, Thongs And Perfect Snogging) dazzles as the 15-year-old John Lennon in this Sam Taylor Wood-directed filming of the memoir by Julia Baird (John’s half-sister), capturing the conflicted rage, tenderness, hormonal confusion and right cheek of the teenage lad. One of rock’s saddest backstories, this has John brought up by his aunt Mimi (Mary) Smith (a well-cast, convincingly pinched Kristin Scott Thomas) but wondering who his mum was/is and finding her within walking distance in the form of the maybe manic but very lovely Julia (Anne-Marie Duff). Lying to Mimi as their relationship deepens (and director Wood daringly demonstrates the sub-Oedipal attachment at its heart), we wait for inevitable emotional wrenching as John assembles the pre-Beatles ‘The Quarrymen’ with Paul McCartney (Thomas Sangster who, it must be said, hardly looks like the real guy).

Unflinching in its exploration of Lennon’s parental issues (note that his rawest solo song was Mother and that he called Yoko that too), this is slightly flatly directed but nevertheless beautifully played, with Thomas and Duff sympathetic despite the potential to demonise both and Johnson electric as the increasingly Teddy-Boy JL (the intensity as we watch the band record their first official track, In Spite Of All The Danger, is electric). And, mercifully, it resists the temptation to fill the canvas with symbols of what was to come for The Beatles (John does walk past Strawberry Field children’s home early on, though), instead vividly depicting this starchy, repressed, haunted-by-WWII world (see also An Education), and hinting at how radically it was about to change under the influence of the Fab Four during those long-lost ‘60s.

Mad Dog

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