Nowhere Boy: Review By harveycritic

NOWHERE BOY

The Weinstein Company

Reviewed for MovieWeb by Harvey Karten

Grade: B

Directed By: Sam Taylor-Wood

Written By: Matt Greenhalgh from Julia Baird's memoir

Cast: Aaron Johnson, Kristin Scott Thomas, David Threlfall, Josh Bolt, Ophelia Lovibond

Screened at: Review 1, NYC, 6/24/10

Opens: October 8, 2010

Nowhere Boy

If director Sam Taylor-Wood wants to convince us that the 1950s were the dullest decade in the history of the Western World, he has succeeded. But that doesn't mean that his movie is dull, nor do the characters who surround the title character, John Lennon (Aaron Johnson), afford us much of a hint of his early greatness. In fact, the dullness of the decade comes largely from the middle-class propriety of the households, whether in the UK or the US or Western Europe. "Nowhere Boy" is adapted by Matt Greenhalgh from Julia Baird's memoir, "The Private John Lennon: The Untold Story from his Sister," published by Ulysses Press just two years ago. While Aaron Johnson, whom some of us know from his role as Dave Lizewski in "Kiss-Ass" (sequel expected in 2012), dominates the screen, much time is given over to the two strong women who shaped his life, his disturbed mother, Julia (Anne-Marie Duff) and Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas), the uptight aunt who takes him in at the age of five.

"Nowhere Boy" is an ironic title, though John got the sobriquet from one of his teachers in the prep school he attended in the mid-fifties. One has no idea where his aunt got the money to send him there since she appears to be without a vocation. Suspended by the headmaster for possessing a porn magazine, John shrugs off school altogether as he becomes interested in playing the guitar and forming his own group. Elvis was triumphant at the time. When shown at the cinema, the girls in the audience would go nuts, just as the bobby-soxers did here in the U.S. upon seeing Frank Sinatra.

Despite the movie's nature as a biopic of John Lennon restricted to a couple of years during the decade, one could attend a screening without knowing just who the guy was or wood become. Sam Taylor-Wood is determined to make this a British drama punctuating the chaotic home life that finds John being smooched regularly by his mother. One gets the impression at first that mother Julia is an older girlfriend of the lad, given her inappropriate cuddling of the boy who was "kidnapped" away from mom by his aunt because at the age of five he wanted to go with his dad to New Zealand, where he'd never again be seen in Liverpool.

John is like an angry young man that could have had a role as Mick Travis in Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film "If," but is saved from becoming a hoodlum by music. He forms a band with Paul McCartney (Thomas Brodie Sangster), fifteen years old at the time with an angelic face that belies his skill with the guitar and his maturity. With the two women in his life impressing John with their outlooks-one a bi-polar mother, the other a prim and proper aunt (with an exceptionally good job by Kristin Scott Thomas)-we see that "Nowhere Boy" is not so much a look at the early days of a rock-and-roll star but the struggle of a renegade toward maturity. The music that Lennon composed for his fledgling band is nothing to write home about, giving not a wisp of a hint of his later productivity. At least those songs were better than the most innocuous drivel of all time which was playing on the radio, "If I Knew You Were Coming I'd've Baked a Cake," sung by Eileen Barton in 1950.

Rated R. 98 minutes. © 2010 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online