He’s a real ‘Nowhere Boy’

In theaters Friday: Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, Sucker Punch

New on DVD/Blu-ray: The Tourist, How Do You Know, Yogi Bear

It is hard to imagine a time when rock music was just another one of the styles elbowing for attention from the pop culture mainstream. In the mid-1950s, jazz and show tunes and Sinatra pop were top-sellers, while a wild combination of boogie-woogie blues, country and gospel was, largely, the underground sound of the South, particularly that of American Americans living in urban centers. Then came Elvis Presley, and the genre exploded.

“Why couldn’t God make me Elvis?” Aaron Johnson’s pre-fame John Lennon whines in Nowhere Boy, a brisk biopic of the Beatles icon as a troubled teen that takes the audience back to a time when both rock-and-roll and one of its most transformative and popular figures were both gloriously nascent.

Based on Imagine This: Growing Up With My Brother John Lennon, a memoir by Lennon’s half-sister Julia Baird, Nowhere Boy eschews any cheesy, Behind the Music-style focus on how every little detail of his youth may or may not have influenced his creations with the Beatles and instead zeroes in on something more interesting, more fundamental: a vulnerable, if whip smart, orphan struggling to find himself, his family and his purpose.

Abandoned by both his young and emotionally unstable mother Julia and a distant merchant seaman father Alfred, Lennon is raised by his strict but endearingly tweedy Aunt Mimi. After Mimi’s husband dies, Lennon spies his mother at the funeral and with a tip from a friend, finds her address and confronts her at home. Having not seen her in years, Lennon is surprised by her effervescence and joie de vivre when she whisks him away on a play date to pal around over laughs and rock-n-roll. Torn between his wise, motherly Aunt—played brilliantly by the underrated Kristen Scott Thomas—and his oddly friendly, free-spirited mom—a wildcard Anne-Marie Duff—Lennon decides to become the next Elvis and devote his life to music. Julia teaches him banjo, then he learns guitar and starts a band called the Quarrymen with a group of misfit classmates.

Of course Paul McCartney soon joins the band and is seen here as little more than a pipsqueak with a litany of guitar chords memorized, a steadying anchor for Lennon’s rollercoaster emotions. George Harrison is recruited, too, as less-devoted members of Lennon’s young group fall away. But the climax of Nowhere Boy is not the first Beatles concert or record deal, it is Lennon learning the heartbreaking truth about his mother, a truth that grows more intensely complex and twisted when unexpected tragedy strikes.

Filled with heart-tugging moments of introspection, a bizarre, borderline inappropriate mother-son relationship, exhilarating moments of humor and thrill-ride music, Nowhere Boy is a fascinating portrait of the John Lennon that few people know, the broken kid longing to connect and to feel a sense of self-worth in a world and in a family that does not seem to want him. “Woman, I know you understand, the little child inside the man,” Lennon sang on one of his last studio recordings before his brutal murder in 1980, and Aaron Johnson’s empathetic and layered portrayal in Nowhere Boy offers a peak behind the curtain for a fresh look at a musical revolutionary.