A rock legend's coming of age

Few musicians have spawned as many biopics as John Lennon. It’s almost as though his early death (at age 40, shot down in front of the Dakota building in 1980) and his rock myth status have made Lennon the perfect object of speculation and movie reenactment.

First there was The Hours and Times (1991), a fictional indie account of what might have happened in a Barcelona hotel room between young Beatle Lennon and manager Brian Epstein (basically a lot of talking, with some room service thrown in); there was Backbeat, a fairly straightforward biopic about the Beatles’ early days in Hamburg, focusing on the artistic bond between Lennon and early bassist Stu Sutcliffe who died of a brain tumor.

Later, Michael Linday-Hogg’s Two of Us took an imaginary fly-on-the-wall’s view of the day Paul McCartney made an impromptu visit to Lennon’s Dakota bunker in 1976. Did they talk about getting back together, even playing a live gig on Saturday Night Live? Possibly.

Maybe it was the premature demise of both the Beatles and Lennon that has led to all the fiction-making. Nowhere Boy, the most recent revisit, casts Kick-Ass’s Aaron Johnson as the artistic Liverpool Teddy Boy with a chip on his shoulder. Consider it John Lennon: The Prequel.

Living with his Auntie Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas, stern as always), 17-year-old Lennon cuts classes, shows his willy to female classmates, and generally acts like a directionless juvenile delinquent. But when his uncle suddenly dies of a heart attack, he notices a figure lurking on the fringes of the funeral service: it’s his mother, Julia (Anne-Marie Duff). Curiosity gets the better of John Winston, who ends up tracking the fairly young Julia down, trying to fathom what led her to abandon him to his auntie at age five.

The Lennon myth has it that Julia’s gift to John was love of music: she is shown teaching him rudimentary banjo chords (this leads to a sped-up montage wherein Lennon quickly becomes a master of skiffle strumming). But it’s the emergence of Elvis Presley that leads Lennon to rock and roll: watching The King shake it in a movie newsreel, you know that’s where little Johnny’s heading: next thing you know he’s slicking back his hair, adopting a sneer and forming a band, The Quarrymen.

So far, nothing new to the average rabid Beatle fan. The script was written by Matt Greenhalgh, who wrote the Joy Division biopic Control, but it doesn’t stray into any of the dark and scary places that that film did. It’s fairly straightforward, relying on the youthful cheekiness of Johnson (buffed up from his nerdy Kick-Ass character) as well as the relative youth of Duff, playing his mother. In fact, their relationship at first has a weird Oedipal cast to it: they’re almost sister and brother, or newfound lovers, dancing to Jerry Lee Lewis, bonding over Screaming Jay Hawkins or staring at each other over tea and biscuits. Of course, the always-curious Lennon is trying to fathom the idea of even having a mother, after spending 12 years living with an aunt who was caring and supportive, but hardly a barrel of laughs.

Nowhere Boy doesn’t shy away from the painful episodes of Lennon’s early life, but also includes good music.

Lennon gets himself suspended from school, and ends up widening the rift between sisters Mimi and Julia by choosing to stay with his mum. Julia’s character is not sugar-coated: she seems to have a litter of kids running around her flat from different parents, and it’s suggested she took comfort in the arms of pretty much any guy who entered the scene or came to read the gas meter. Lennon’s dad, we know from our history books, was a merchant seaman who planted his seed and just as quickly headed out to port again, reputedly to live in faraway Australia. (Lennon never did meet his dad, even after achieving global fame.)

The other subplot of Nowhere Boy focuses on Lennon meeting up with future bandmates George Harrison and Paul McCartney. Thomas Brodie Sangster, who plays McCartney as a preternaturally talented runt, pushes Lennon to write his own material; a key scene shows him teaching the older John a batch of chords.

Neither Johnson or Sangster particularly resemble their historical counterparts, and that’s usually a problem in biopics. Joaquin Phoenix, despite his wacky method acting in Walk the Line, really wouldn’t be mistaken in any police lineup for Johnny Cash. But somehow he pulled it off. Here, it’s the momentum of the material, the fact that we know where these two are eventually heading, that lends Nowhere Boy a certain historical inevitability.

Another historical inevitability is that, just as Lennon comes to know and accept his mother for the first time, she will be tragically and swiftly removed from his life again by a drunk driver. The only thing that comes as news here is that the accident happened in broad daylight. (I always thought of drunk drivers as being nocturnal hazards, but I suppose there are some who get started early in the day.) Lennon is crushed, of course, and yet in Nowhere Boy’s compressed narrative, all his bitterness is quickly subsumed and re-channeled by his new mate, the born showman McCartney, into focusing on the band, soon to be renamed — for a short time — the Silver Beatles.

Of course, Lennon’s mother issues actually resurfaced in many ways throughout his life: a difficult, indifferent marriage to Cynthia; bitter lyrics, even in sunny tunes such as Getting Better (“I used to be mean to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved”); and the discovery of his ultimate mother figure, Yoko Ono, whom he met in a London gallery in 1966. Then of course, there’s the song Julia, a kind of sighing release after all the building angst of being a Beatle, from 1968’s “White Album.”

That song, in fact, may be a more honest coming to terms than anything depicted in Nowhere Boy, though there is one great scene near the end, where Lennon first enters a recording studio with George and Paul, capturing on acetate an early Lennon-McCartney original, In Spite of All the Danger. It’s an unbroken take, and as the song builds from verse to verse, we see tears of rage welling and receding on Johnson’s face, as he pours his passion into the rock ‘n’ roll that will come to define his image, using words to mask what the heart can never quite recapture.