Bird's Eye View

BEV Review: Nowhere Boy

Sam Taylor-Wood in action:directing Nowhere Boy

About a third of the way into Nowhere Boy, there’s a moment which snaps the viewer back to director Sam Taylor-Wood’s debut short, Love You More: a close-up of a needle being delicately settled on a vinyl groove, an audible crackle which sparks an electric sense of silent anticipation and sexual tension… And then a rock ‘n’ roll record lets rip. Except, this time round, it’s not 1978 and it’s not the Buzzcock’s unrestrained ‘Love You More’ providing both foreplay and soundtrack to the teenage protagonists’ charming, fumbling, randy lovemaking; it’s the fag end of the 1950s, it’s Screamin’ Jay Hawkins howling, thrilling ‘I Put a Spell on You’ on the stereo, and the two thumping hearts trying not to be heard over it belong to a teenager called John Lennon and his estranged mother. In essence, it’s a tad more complicated this time round.

What this nod winningly illustrates is that while Taylor-Wood has gone back in time for her debut feature, she’s come on in leaps and bounds, both in stylistic and narrative terms, since making Love You More – whilst still retaining the vim that made her cinematic debut so arresting. Where Love You More occasionally felt a little gauche and try-hard, Nowhere Boy – at heart another musically (and sexually) charged coming of age story – is confident and measured.

Perhaps surprisingly, Taylor-Wood resists the temptation to over egg the pudding visually. Certainly, Liverpool’s docks and the Strawberry Field of Lennon’s childhood are elegantly shot by Taylor-Wood’s long-time collaborator Seamus McGarvey, the detailed 50s interiors and fashions are well served by production and costume designers and Taylor-Wood doesn’t resist the odd stylistic flourish (in particular, a neat time-lapse trick recalling some of her earlier artworks, which depicts Lennon in real-time, immersed in learning the banjo over the course of a week, while in the same frame the rest of the world zips by at heightened speed).

Aaron Johnson as John Lennon

Rightly though, all these merely function as stage dressing for what is a full-throttle and hugely compelling family drama. And the performance’s shining star is Aaron Johnson – a revelation as the young Lennon, who sensitively manages to hint at some of his later mannerisms yet escapes the trap of cartoonish caricature. That heavy burden aside, he shows great versatility in playing a mercurial, confused and cocky adolescent everyman. The missing link which transformed John Lennon from being just that into the icon he was to become – a creative drive and anarchic spirit – is, without ever being shoved down our throats, convincingly imagined by Control screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh’s excellent script, which poises the teenager at the sharpest point of the triangle he inhabits alongside his aunt Mimi and mother Julia.

Both women – Kristin Scott Thomas as Lennon’s long-suffering, strict and undemonstrative guardian, versus Anne-Marie Duff as the late-coming, unstable yet romantic and exciting mother, unable to care for her son – provide full-throated backing to Johnson’s lead vocal. Again, without boiling the key players in Lennon’s youth down to simplistic archetypes, Mimi – with her buttoned-up reliance on convention and decorum – and premature 60s girl Julia – in her hedonistic sense of fun, promiscuity (or her ‘need for company’, as Mimi brilliantly euphemises) and non-conformism – movingly embody the past, present and future into which Lennon and his band were to explode in all directions.

Nowhere Boy is released on 26th December. Show your support for Sam Taylor-Wood and women directors by going to see it on its opening weekend release. For more information, vistit our First Weekenders page.