Review of Nowhere Boy (2009) by Erin O — 15 Nov 2010

Nowhere Boy is a decent enough biopic of a teenage John Lennon, but the danger with such films is that they become shallow novelty pieces, lacking in insight and existing purely to give history some pretty images.

Taylor-Wood's film veers into this territory once the teenage Lennon, McCartney and Harrison join forces but the focus of the film is in the peculair menage a trois relationship between Lennon and the two maternal figures in his life, uptight conservative Aunt Mimi and free spirited, music loving but vulnerable mother Julia.

These two parts have the strongest acting, with Kristin Scott Thomas perfectly balancing an uptight mask with a genuine maternal love whilst Anne-Marie Duff plays his mother as a flirty, fun but emotionally immature and vulnerable young woman.

The film begins by playing up the Oedipal aspects to the max, with Lennon almost "dating" his ma following their reunion, but finally realising how important the woman who brought him up and stood by him is.

All the while, this feeds his creative impulses and develops his cocky, sardonic sometimes plain cruel personality. There are no eureka moments to understanding one of the 20th centuries most worshipped musicians, but it gives a good sense of the emotional complexities the young Lennon experienced which inevitably infused his later art - all in a fairly bog-standard, visually unimaginative biopic framework.

Iain Softley's Backbeat takes up the story from here...