Nowhere Boy Poster

Nowhere Boy (2009)

Biography | Music 
Rayting:   7.1/10 35.2K votes
Country: UK | Canada
Language: English
Release date: 1 April 2010

A chronicle of John Lennon's first years, focused mainly in his adolescence and his relationship with his stern aunt Mimi, who raised him, and his absentee mother Julia, who re entered his life at a crucial moment in his young life.

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User Reviews

gut-6 2 January 2010

Let's face it, John Lennon is interesting because he was a member of and a major songwriter for the Beatles. Most of his interesting non-musical experiences happened as a consequence of his Beatles membership. For some reason this film decides that all of that is less important and interesting than his relationship with his aunt and mother during his late teens. The founding of the Quarrymen and Beatles is just a minor subplot. We don't even get to their Hamburg experiences.

Instead what we get is a humdrum kitchen sink soapie that leaves you wanting less. Its main dramatic focus is the belated revelation of how John Lennon's stern aunt became his guardian even though his more attitudinally compatible mother lived around the corner. This is all explained in one scene, having been previously hinted at a few times in dream sequences. The rest of this overlong film is mainly padded out with tedious scenes of banal domesticity portraying John's rebelliousness, his mother's immaturity and flightiness, and his prim aunt's strictness. There's a bit of teenage truancy, mild sexual encounters and what passed for teenage hijinks in the 1950's, again quite dull. There are a few scenes hinting at his burgeoning interest in rock and roll and growing musical skill, but this is portrayed in an uninteresting manner and is mainly towards the end. If banal kitchen sink soapies are for you then you might like this movie, but it has little to do with John Lennon the musical icon. It is almost false advertising to use his name.

There were some interesting aspects of Lennon's life during this time, such as his art school experiences, his manipulative pursuit of Cynthia, his compulsive mocking of the physically flawed and the early struggles to get gigs. However all this is left out of the film. I suspect many of this film's flaws come from the film being based on a single memoir by one person who knew only one aspect of the subject's life. This is a common flaw with celebrity memoirs and biopics, but it's an especially major flaw when the memoir deals one of the least interesting aspects of one of the least interesting periods in his life.

As for the implementation aspects of a flawed concept, the film has an overall slightly cheap low budget look, although the acting is adequate. It's a little jarring though that they use a handsome actor to play Lennon and an ugly actor to play McCartney. Kristin Scott-Thomas is surprisingly convincing despite playing against type in an unglamorous role.

saadgkhan 28 July 2010

Fmovies: NOWHERE BOY – CATCH IT ( A ) Based upon the early life of Mr. John Lennon, this movie is truly wonderful… best thing about the movie is it's more of a British family drama then changed into totally music extravaganza… AarOn Johnson is undoubtedly the Best young Actor around … His portrayal of john Lennon' s is just incredible…from sweetness, to witness and cockiness… he grapes perfectly on all parts of John Lennon's behavior. Other incredible performance in the movie is by Anne-Marie Duff... She is outstanding, she is so good that I actually forgot that I m watching a movie and she is playing her role... You just want to see her previous work that good she is in this movie...Kristin Scott Thomas gave another great performance... All these three actors make the movie believable and if John Lennon would have been alive today... must be proud of them... In the end 1st time Director Sam Taylor-Wood did an excellent job with the story and movie. I still think about the movie and want to watch all over again.

soupster1 27 April 2010

I am amazed that the film industry is still turning out cliché ridden garbage like this. That significantly good actors like Kristen Scott- Thomas take part in such rubbish leaves me breathless with astonishment.

This 'leafy' and squeaky clean suburb of Liverpool never existed. It is a cinematographer's invention,... As is the idea that the young Lennon wore wire framed glasses. But hey!... we are just the audience... we need familiar reference points because we might forget who John Lennon was! Was he that bloke with the 'granny' glasses?

The fact is, there was nothing astonishing or even particularly interesting about Lennon's childhood. He himself said that at the age of 16, he was just the same as any other little Hoylake **** of 16.

The perpetuation of the myth that he was some sort of saint is not only the big lie about The Beatles...it is an even bigger lie about the man. He wrote the line about imaging no possessions, but had a separate apartment just to keep his clothes in.

In his defence... he had little patience with the people who glorified him, but dead pop stars are good business... so on it goes.

Beatles fans don't come more dedicated than me. i was there at the time. I still listen to the music on an almost daily basis, but i don't need the constant repetition of exaggerated fake nonsense about them. The music was enough... Let it be.

jonnyhavey 24 October 2010

Nowhere Boy fmovies. Nowhere Boy is a film based the biography, Imagine This: Growing Up With My Brother John Lennon," written by his half sister Julia Baird. It tells the untold story of the late teenage years of one of the greatest musicians of all time, John Lennon and the strong influences his mother Julia Lennon (Anne-Marie Duff) and his aunt Mimi Smith (Kristin Scott Thomas) who created the foundation for his future as a person and the indelible mark he was about to leave on music forever. The film has created quite a racket throughout the UK since its release in December 2009 capturing four well deserved British Academy Film Award nominations including; Outstanding British Film, Best Supporting Actress Anne-Marie Duff and Kristen Scott Thomas and Outstanding Director Debut Sam Taylor Wood. These awards are the fire that the film is running off of for its debut in the United States this month.

Aaron Johnsons does a very good interpretation of his character John Lennon and reveals the mischievous antics of the teen aged John Lennon and the constant internal battle Lennon fought inside of himself to find out who he was. He is guided by the outstanding performances of Duff and Thomas as his guardians through his very rough childhood. Duff leads the cast with the best performance in the entire film by seamlessly embodying the character of John Lennon's mother Julia and has an American Oscar Nomination waiting for her in the upcoming months. These performances combined with the unique storytelling style of Director Wood and writer Matthew Greenhalgh with the help of Julia Baird's memoirs have created a film that is very different than a lot of films that focus on the lives of renown figures in history. They do this by focusing a narrow period of time allowing them to delve deep into the plot and story development giving the audience time to take in the entirety of the story, instead of stretching the film over a twenty plus year period of time.

The integrity that Wood and Greenhlgh produce with this style of filming allows the acting performances to flourish and creates the lost persona of the John Lennon, to be fully exemplified. I recommend seeing it now in order to be apart of the audience taken on the journey of Nowhere Boy. This journey of the "Nowhere Boy" himself is embodied by the lyric of the following song Mother from his debut solo album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, "Mother, you had me but I never had you. I wanted you, you didn't want me. So I just got to tell you goodbye, goodbye..."

flickernatic 30 December 2009

This biopic of John Lennon, taking his story from his schooldays in Liverpool up until the departure of the nascent Beatles for Hamburg, is an exceptional movie, quite the best I have seen during 2009. The story is beautifully handled from beginning to end and the acting from the three main leads is superb. Aaron Johnson manages to portray Lennon's mixture of cockiness (in more ways than one!), aggression, painful vulnerability, bewilderment and sheer adolescent verve with great sureness of touch. We watch Lennon developing from school-kid into knowing young man, and we literally see a different face at the end of the movie to the one we did at the start. Superb playing by Johnson, brilliantly assisted by that of Kristin Scott Thomas as his Aunt Mimi and Anne-Marie Duff as his mother, Julia. It would have been all too easy to lapse into cliché with this story but this is largely avoided. We get glimpses of Liverpool - an opening on the steps of St George's Hall, a fleeting glimpse of Strawberry Fields, a shot of a ferry on the Mersey - but these glimpses are all we need. And the movie closes not with a rendition of an all too predictable 'Nowhere Man' but a beautifully performed 'In Spite of All the Danger'. They say it's a long way to the top if you wanna rock n' roll; in Nowhere Boy we can see where it, and we, all began.

phantom_fan89 21 December 2009

Visual artist Sam Taylor Wood has crafted the most entertaining and thought provoking piece of Lennon mythology to date in her debut feature film Nowhere Boy.

The movie chronicles the adolescent years of John Lennon. Having been brought up by his Aunt Mimi, John's world is turned upside when his free spirited mother Julia re-enters his life, ripping him open and pulling out his artistry as well as pain, anger and frustration.

A number of films and documentaries have tried and failed to make a definitive statement about John Lennon the human being. The reason why Nowhere Boy is so successful is because we are presented with a complex and multi faceted young man, who was a number of things to a number of people and impossible to pigeonhole.

Based on the novel by John's sister Julia Baird with the script penned by Matt Greenhalgh, Nowhere Boy possesses an enormously strong emotional undercurrent that is missing from many films of the biopic genre. The Lennon legend has risen to almost unparalleled mythical heights within our culture and Greenhalgh does a superb job at humanising the story, so much that you forget that you are watching a film about a legend in the making, but rather the story of a young boy caught between the women he loves.

The women in question are John's Aunt Mimi played by the ever brilliant Kristen Scott Thomas and his mother Julia, brought to life in a star making turn by Anne-Marie Duff. Though much of the acclaim seems to be percolating around Duff's performance, Scott Thomas deserves to be equally praised for making the incredibly complex character of Mimi relatable and sympathetic. In the wrong hands Aunt Mimi could have come across as highly unlikeable considering she can often appear distant and cold, but Scott Thomas juxtaposes these instances with such an understated kindness and warmth that we as the audience realise that Mimi is a very caring person who has the misfortune of finding it almost impossible to express sentimental feelings. On the other end of the spectrum Julia appears to be everything Mimi isn't- a free spirit who flouts convention and lives for a good time. Julia is a flirt. She flirts with life, men and even her own son. There is a rather incestuous undercurrent to her and John's relationship such as when she lays on top of him, lost in ecstasy to the tune "I Put A Spell On You". The scene is uncomfortable, as is many aspects of their relationship. In many ways she seems more like a girlfriend to John and as the movie progresses we begin to understand more and more Mimi's misgivings. In many ways Julia has never really grown up and only knows how to engage with men in this seductive manner.

John Lennon is played by relative unknown Aaron Johnson, mainly associated with his role in Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging. Johnson breaks free from the shackles of his teen pin-up persona and delivers a mature and layered performance worthy of accolades. Johnson fully embodies Lennon's complexities; he is both good and bad, insecure and arrogant, sensitive and brutal, caring and careless. From Lennon's wit to his magnetism, pain, anger and sarcasm, Johnson gets it all. Considering Lennon is one of the most imitated celebrities of our time Johnson does well to avoid caricature, creating a version of Lennon at his most human. Johnson's vocal abilities also sound eerily reminiscent of a young Lennon, making him an excellent choice in more ways than one.

Taylor Wood is definitely a talent to watch as

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