Review: 'Nowhere Boy' A Suspiciously Anti-Rock 'N' Roll Story Of John Lennon

The movies trivialize. Unless we’re discussing a once-a-generation feat of filmmaking (not an exaggerated timeline), capturing true stories onscreen minimizes them: the more significant the event, the lesser the film. It’s why most films about historical events and time periods remain successful because they attempt an intimate approach, refocusing the tale history tells with a fly-on-the-wall approach to human drama.

As such, director Sam Taylor-Wood and her collaborators are hamstrung in chronicling the life of John Lennon in “Nowhere Boy.” While there are documents, books and essays, written about the time period when Lennon was a rowdy lad, fans have constructed their own stories about where the titanic troubadour has come from thanks to a staggering body of work left behind, an unimpeachable legacy influencing every pop-centric mind of his generation and beyond. One could tell the story of the founder of the Beatles with a canny tune or three that offers a compendium on the adventures of the shaggy-haired troublemaker from Liverpool, but alas, taking the fans’ route and utilizing the music that shaped the twentieth century would make this a hundred million dollar film before cameras began to roll.

What we have instead is a travelogue through the home life of the plucky young would-be hooligan, who initially had no outlet for a naturally-restless spirit. Raised by his aunt and ignorant of his true lineage, he spends his days chain-smoking, hell-raising, skirt-lifting. It’s the passing of his uncle that brings out an incongruous image at the funeral: an older woman in a red dress who John immediately realizes his a fellow free spirit.

With some junior detective work, he finds that the woman, Julia, is his real mother, and she eagerly takes him in when his stressed aunt starts to bear down on his bad behavior. Soon, she’s teaching him about rock and roll, hissing suggestively that the craft is all about “sexxxxxxxxx.” A few guitar sessions later, and the strapping young fellow is ready to form the Quarrymen with a few schoolmates, beginning more than a few laps around what we now know is rock history.

The end of the story, it must be said, is not the End of the Story. No, Lennon must have an Oedipal breakthrough with Julia, who left him to his aunt at a young age due to youthful recklessness in one of the film’s many generalized diagnoses. She’s too generous with her affection, the movie seems to argue, which is why she must set free the one she loves. It’s a tidy explanation of her psychosis that renders John Lennon’s backgrounds as punishment melodrama. She is used by the story in an economical manner, the spark that lit the fuse of the Beatles, summarily done away with to allow a bond to strengthen between John and his schoolmarmish aunt.

Aaron Johnson, who many viewers remember as the overly ambitious costumed scamp of “Kick Ass,” pumps his characterization of Lennon with spunk and attitude. We’re uncertain if this is shoddy writing or the depths Johnson fails to plumb, but Lennon, as depicted in this film, is at first a brash rebel dancing on the grave of propriety, and later an apple-cheeked thug with an authority problem. The broad-shouldered Johnson may also be miscast: he uncomfortably towers over soft-spoken Thomas Sangster’s Paul McCartney, a baby-faced bully of patronizing pugilism who inspires actual cowardice in other characters. An unsympathetic portrayal of John Lennon feels fresh at the start, but the film’s armchair psychology showcases Johnson/Lennon as a shiftless youth eventually poisoned by the well of rock and roll. It’s almost like a Lennon biopic made by the mothers of that generation who felt guitar rock would rot the youth of tomorrow.

Anne-Marie Duff plays his ebullient mother with a parade-starting enthusiasm best-suited to a Tennessee Williams production. Even with a few grace notes in quieter moments, she comes on strong and only plays bigger as the film goes on. As Lennon’s dry aunt, Kristen Scott Thomas has a few of the film’s strongest moments, turning a stock character, the motherly figure who humorlessly knows what’s best (and occasionally spills entire paragraphs of exposition) into a warm, complex figure. At the film’s close, a text crawl notifies us that Lennon kept in close touch with his aunt every week after moving out, and Ms. Thomas’ performance informs this note with bittersweet quality, as a woman who thanklessly raised a rock god despite consistently questioning her own right to influence him. Perhaps they should have made that movie instead. [D+]