10/22/2010
Review by David Anthony
“Nowhere Boy,” a film by Sam Taylor-Wood
The biopic genre almost always leaves one wanting more. Typically they seem aimed at the choir. So knowing that you are going to be spending 90 minutes with John Lennon just before he becomes a Beatle must immediately appeal to a particular type of viewer. Perhaps like yours truly you are of a certain age, a recovering baby boomer, but then again there is so much that attracted and still attracts people to John, his charisma, his chutzpah,, his profanity, in every sense, in sum, a vitality that lends him immortality.
In Sam Taylor Wood’s Nowhere Boy we see all of that in its nascent stages, in embryo. Most of what greets us is the turmoil of the last stages of his interminable adolescence. Captured incandescently by Aaron Johnson, it walks us through mid-fifties Liverpool by way of a troubled teen and his fragile mum, Julia and hard as nails Aunt Mimi who did the heavy lifting in seeing to it that her rebellious and wayward nephew survived. The struggle between the conformity of the aunt and the libertinism of the mother take their toll on the young man, who uses poetic and later musical talents to confect his anguish.
Along the way we also meet an impossibly youthful Paul McCartney, who as the film would have it, helps John hone the skills needed to polish what starts as a diamond in the rough to the gem we associate with the writing duo that built the Abbey Road of memory.
Because this is an artistic coming of age film, \rather than a sweeping retrospective of a life, it is very different from, say, Ray or I Walk The Line, for instance, whose bad boy protagonists lived full if vexed lives. Nowhere Boy, however, cuts away just when the unnamed new band is about to hit the big time in Hamburg, and rightly so. We know what follows but are not on as firm ground when wondering what preceded it, hence the rationale for this prequel version of the Lennon legend, one more in line with Coco Before Chanel.
Always a sucker for a well researched period piece, I was fairly satisfied with the movie’s recreation of Liverpool. It also brought back the hideousness of high school and what used to be known as the awkward age, difficult enough in this country but abominable when mixed with the English class system as reflected in the public (private) school.
The acting was especially memorable, notably the two dueling female leads, sisters Mimi, Kristin Scott Thomas and Julia, Anne Marie Duff, John’s wanton biological mom. The story pivots around family, as Mimi’s husband, John’s Uncle George, played by David Threlfall as well as the characters comprising The Quarrymen, who link us to what will follow.
Mortality seems to hover in the background in small and large ways, not only in the key tragedy of the film, which, once seen will readily be recognized, but in the haunting fact that the late Anthony Minghella inspired director Taylor-Wood to do this.
See Nowhere Boy and move on with your own creative mission, whatever that may be.
For the KUSP Film Gang, this is David Anthony.