Sam Taylor-Wood’s “Nowhere Boy”, about John Lennon’s teen years in late 1950’s Liverpool, is two movies in one. The first is a pop psychological pulp soap about the tug of war between Aunt Mimi and his mother, Julia, for custody of John. The second is a journey thru the early years of Lennon’s musical career. The first is total and complete crap. The second has its moments.
Let’s deal with the second. Taylor-Wood’s has no concept of rock and roll or the formation of Lennon’s musical gifts. Nothing about her opinion that Lennon’s interest in rock and roll was based upon his borderline incestuous love and wish to impress his mother has the ring of truth. And her knowledge of the important music that formed his taste, Arthur Crudup, Mickey And Sylvia -stuff like that, non existent.
So what is good? The developing musical collaboration between Aaron Johnson’s Lennon and David Threfall (who has so much goodwill accrued with me after his performance back when a child in “Love Actually”) as McCartney. There are moments that is like eavesdropping in the past. The pix at the top is from “Nowhere Boy”, the pix below is real.
Taylor-Woods began her career as a photographer and her tableau’s mirroring famous Lennon pictures (the Quarrymen playing at a fair) is real good -reminiscent of the (infinitely superior) Jean Renoir’s “Picnic On The Grass”.
But the mother-son-aunt triangle is atrocious. The director wrote that this is a love triangle in which one of the angles happens to be John Lennon. Nonsense. Without the thought of Lennon this soapy sudsy story would die a deserved death. The story with Lenno? Not one second rings true even when it is based on Lennon’s own memories.. . Yoko Ono sues everything that moves. Why didn’t she sue this insultingly stupid vision of John Lennon?
Look at it this way: Lennon has moved into the world of myth, to humanize him is to keep him but only up to the point where we have a use for him. If we can’t use it we should throw it away and this dire vision of a witless, incestuous Lennon misses just about everything that made him great.