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Nowhere Boy
By Lorraine LoBianco
Summary: A chronicle of John Lennon's childhood.
Director: Sam Taylor-Wood 
Sam Taylor-Wood’s film “Nowhere Boy”, which is based on the memoir by Julia Baird, John Lennon’s half-sister, examines the early life of Lennon in the days before Beatlemania, when he was still a teenager getting in trouble at school, learning to play guitar, and becoming friends with a kid named Paul McCartney.
While Lennon’s development as a musician is an important element of the film, it’s really about the struggle between Lennon, his Aunt Mimi who raised him and his real mother, Julia. The contrasts between the two women couldn’t be more pronounced, and Taylor-Wood’s clever use of color underscores this. Mimi, strict and emotionally distant, wears mostly dark clothes, a severe hairdo, and lives in a typically-decorated post-WWII British middle-class home. The colors are drab, the atmosphere is drab and so is Mimi.
Lennon decides to go visit his mother Julia, who is a vibrant woman who seems to live in red. Her clothes, her earrings, her hair, her home, even her front door. When she takes John to a café to listen to Rock-N-Roll music, the place is likewise red: red seats, a red record player, mugs, decorations, and many people in the café wear red. As she tells her son “Rock-N-Roll is sex!” So is the color red. There is a very incestuous feel to the relationship, and later, when Lennon has sex with a girl in a park, she is also wearing red nail polish and a red scarf.
Oddly enough, it is not Lennon but Mimi who evolves throughout the course of the film. In the earliest scenes of the film her husband George dies collapses and dies. Mimi returns from the hospital to simply say to John, “He’s dead.” When John bursts into tears and hugs her, she pushes him away and starts washing the dishes, telling him, “Let’s not be silly. You want to do that, go to your room. Now let’s get on with it, shall we?” At the end of the film, she is a different woman. Not a total transformation – that’s for a Hollywood film – but she has changed.
By contrast, Julia is all hugs and kisses and dancing and emotion. Too much emotion. In one brief shot, we see her locked away in the house, not answering the door when John shows up. She is not made up and disheveled and later admits that she sometimes becomes sad and can’t sleep. Her husband is afraid he will “lose” her again. All signs point to manic-depression. No wonder Lennon’s confused.
By the end of the film when Lennon confronts his mother and demands the truth about his father, it is Mimi who tells the truth. Suddenly, all preconceived notions are ripped away and we (and Lennon) begin to see the women very differently. The air has been cleared, the truth is out, there are emotional storms and a drunken stagger home. But a shift has occurred in the relationship between all three.
And then the unexpected tragedy that haunted Lennon to the end of his life.
Acting props go to 20 year-old Aaron Johnson (who recently had a daughter with director Sam Taylor-Wood) as Lennon. At first glance, he is too handsome to play Lennon but little by little he manages to win over the audience. While he does not disappear within the character, he gives off the charisma needed to play someone like John Lennon. Expect to see a lot more from him. Kristin Scott Thomas doesn’t play Mimi as a one-note character, but multi-layered. There are strong currents running beneath the icy façade and Thomas is a master at this. Ann-Marie Duff portrays Julia as a woman who never grew up and lives her life in excess, symptomatic of manic-depression, but never turns her into a caricature. She makes the character real. It is to her and Kristin Scott Thomas’ credit that in the end, the sympathy goes to Mimi.
I was almost a little afraid to see “Nowhere Boy”, to be honest. John Lennon died eleven days before my thirteenth birthday. In the year that followed, there was almost a resurgence of Beatlemania and I was swept up in it as only a teenager can be. The walls of my bedroom were plastered with Beatle posters; I had all the records, bought all the books and even dragged my poor fifteen year-old boyfriend to a Beatlefest. For the record, my favorite was Paul.
Then time (and I) moved on.
Rock-N-Roll was replaced with Jazz as my music of choice, but I still remembered the details of Lennon’s life. For someone who has a nasty habit of nit-picking when details in a movie are not quite right and for someone who read so many books on the Beatles as a teenager, I was prepared to be disappointed. I needn’t have worried. Taylor-Wood gets the details excruciatingly right. There’s not a false note that I could find. And I looked. The period is recreated beautifully, we see Lennon listening to “The Goon Show” over the radio (the ground-breaking BBC program that launched the careers of Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers and influenced not only the Beatles but the members of Monty Python.), hanging out with his friend Pete Shotton (Josh Bolt being a near look-alike of the real Shotton), drawing his own magazine, and later replacing his National Health Service glasses with Buddy Holly specs. It is in the details that “Nowhere Boy” really shines as a period piece. A very promising debut directorial effort by Sam Taylor-Wood.
Lorraine LoBianco is an Addy™ award-winning creative writer and brings fifteen years of experience from the film and television world having worked for Fox Movie Channel, Turner Classic Movies Interactive and The American Film Institute.
Contact the Segue Newsroom; segue@mediaquire.com
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