When it comes to John Lennon and
the Beatles I’m an old dog, Pavlov’s dog at that, so when a certain chord is
struck at the beginning of Sam Taylor-Wood’s Nowhere Boy my auditory
juices are primed for A Hard Day’s Night. Alas, I’m stuck in the wrong
decade for female director Taylor-Wood’s tale -- penned by Matt Greenhalgh,
screenwriter of the Joy Division biopic, Control – opens in 1955 as the
future rock star is acting more like a superstar juvenile delinquent –
“Fuck-off, Lennon, show us your cock!” – clinging to the roof of a Liverpool
double-decker bus to win a girl away from another bullyboy, and generally
playing the class clown at Liverpool’s middle-class-aspiring Quarry Bank High
School.
Hauled up before the headmaster,
accused of flashing a porno comic book on the bus, the exasperated official
scowls, “You’re going nowhere, Mr. Lennon, and not only at Quarry Bank,” to
which a cheeky Lennon replies, “There’s no room for genius, sir.”
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At the outset Aaron Johnson’s
Lennon shows precious few signs of genius – a virtual outcast at school, the
gangly fifteen-year-old is most at ease scribbling small poems into a notebook
or lying in his room, feet splayed up on the wall listening to England’s man of
a thousand accents, Peter Sellers and BBC Radio’s surreal Goon Show with
his Uncle George, while prim and proper Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas),
grimly haunts the front parlor with her gramophone. One night Lennon’s world is
shattered when Uncle George falls over dead while they’re listening to the
Goons. Shortly after the funeral Lennon is shocked when a school pal takes him
to visit his sassy birth-mom Julia (Anne-Marie Duff) who gives him a guitar and
then embarks on what almost reads like an extra-marital affair with John.
Inevitably Julia’s return threatens and angers Mimi who eventually spills the beans
on Lennon’s twisted birth story: how he winds up with two moms and a sailor dad
who runs away to New Zealand after first threatening to make off with the
terrified five-year-old.
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While other films have covered the
ambiguous shoals of Lennon’s relationship with his tortured, closeted manager
Brian Epstein (The Hours and the Times) or the drunken knockabout months
of their madcap Hamburg days (Backbeat), Nowhere Boy reveals the
childhood scars of a yet to be “more famous than Jesus” boy before he learned
to translate his poetry into lyrics; the soon to be covered up heartbreak of a
lad torn between riotously incompatible mommy figures: Kristin Scott Thomas
nimbly shows us what a drag a good role model can be, then neatly subverts her
uptight aunty with a searing peek at a strong woman who saved a fragile boy
from the train wreak of recklessly flighty young parents, thrown together while
Liverpool was under German bombing raids.
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Anne-Marie Duff – who’s got the
showy, award bait part – captivates in the emotionally punishing role as the
refusing to act her age seductress who treats her only son as her secret lover,
only to drop him on his head when the stress of this high wire unnatural act
prompts her to retreat into clinical depression.
Once you get over the fact that
none of the talented actor lads playing Lennon’s first band, The Quarrymen,
bare much of a physical resemblance to the soon-to-be fab mop tops, John, Paul
and George, the backstage fistfights, quite literally at times, between a
bullying, cocky Lennon and a smooth, pretty boy, girl magnet Paul (Thomas
Brodie Sangster) are an intriguing dress rehearsal for the band that will soon
rock our worlds. Warning the Quarrymen’s skiffle influenced tunes are mainly
interesting for the glimpse of an embryonic sound nurtured by young musicians
who got off to showing off for friends and the hometown crowd.
Aaron Johnson, to his credit,
resists an Ian Hart style mimicking of the Lennon we thought we knew but
instead bases his character on a young boy’s sly attempts to turn his real pain
into the grist for perhaps the most iconic of the sixties’ rebels. Johnson is
deft at capturing an uptight lad who could punch Paul’s lights out one minute
and the next minute hug him like a brother for the shared pain of their messy
mama issues.
I’ve often reflected that the
Beatles, as seen in the Marx Brothers influenced, A Hard Days Night, were
the nihilistic pop incubator for my homo love. Nowhere Boy is the story
of that incubator’s construction and an odd owner’s manual for re-imagining
your re-mastered Beatles discs.