Aaron Johnson

There are so many ways in which "Nowhere Boy," an emotionally raw and yet raucous riff on John Lennon's turbulent teenage years, is such an entertaining piece of nostalgia.

Just past the seminal artist's 70th birthday (Oct. 9), the film takes us back to a time when rock 'n' roll was still finding its way and its warriors.

Lennon's is by now a much-examined life -- still, most of the attention has been on his years with the Beatles, then as a solo artist and finally his murder at 40 and the unfinished musical legacy left behind. Instead, director Sam Taylor-Wood has concentrated her focus on a relatively obscure time beginning in 1955 when a series of personal losses, layered on top of typical 15-year-old rebellion, conspired to reshape a boy who, without those twists of fate, might have grown into an ordinary man.

The movie opens with John (Aaron Johnson) roughhousing with his beloved uncle George (David Threlfall), who with John's prig of an aunt, Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas), took him in as a child and raised him as their own. Where George easily doles out affection and, as significantly, John's first musical instrument, a harmonica, Scott Thomas' Mimi has mastered the art of looking down her nose at the world and everyone in it as if they were giving off a slightly bad smell. For now, Lennon's mother is little more than random scraps of childhood memories.

George's fatal heart attack changes all that, reconnecting John with Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), the mother who deserted him, and setting up a tug-of-war between the estranged sisters that will forever shift his bearings and long influence his music. Where Mimi is a keep-the-windows-locked kind of influence in his life, Julia is a throw-them-open-and-let-the-sun-shine-in sort. Julia takes John into her life, introducing him to the emerging underground sounds of blues, rock and Elvis; she will teach him to play the banjo. But it is Mimi who bends to buy him his first guitar, only to sell it when his grades falter. Meanwhile for us, it's moving and telling to watch Duff and Scott Thomas in pitch-perfect performances as the women who battle for John's heart and mind.

Their struggle would have no traction without a compelling presence in the center of the storm. In this the filmmakers got lucky with Johnson. He infuses his character with a winning blend of teenage uncertainty and cocksure charisma and manages the singing and playing as if he were not doing it for the first time. That Johnson bears an uncanny resemblance to the singer-songwriter only helps.

As Lennon takes shape, so does the band that will eventually become the Beatles. He meets Paul McCartney, played as a thin, boyish wisp of musical ardor by Thomas Brodie Sangster. George Harrison (Sam Bell) barely makes it onto the scene before the boys are off to Hamburg, Germany, with John promising to call Mimi every week so she won't worry, which he did until the week he died.

 

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"Nowhere Boy" Movie Trailer

 

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MPAA rating: R (for language and a scene of sexuality)

Running time: 1:38.

Cast: Aaron Johnson (John), Anne-Marie Duff (Julia), Kristin Scott Thomas (Mimi), David Morrissey (Bobby), David Threlfall (Uncle George)

Credits: Directed by Sam Taylor-Wood; written by Matt Greenhalgh; produced by Douglas Rae, Robert Bernstein, Kevin Loader. A Weinstein Co. release.