Nowhere Boy is the depiction of John Lennon as the adolescent founding member of The Quarry Men.  Aaron Johnson, 19 (The Illusionist and Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging), due to marry the film’s director Sam Taylor-Wood, 42, portrays Lennon as a fifteen-year-old getting his first harmonica and learning to play the banjo with his mother, Julia, and the guitar with Paul Mc.Cartney (which Johnson himself had to learn for the film).  He discovers rock and roll music and longs to be Elvis.

Aaron Johnson’s at times unlikeable Lennon, displays an ego the envy of any lead singer worth his salt and a precocious wit and caustic tongue that gets him out of, but more often into, trouble.  Pobjoy, Lennon’s headmaster at Quarry Bank, canes Lennon for an amusing indiscretion; though Pobjoy would go on to give peace a chance by abandoning corporal punishment in 1961, 25 years before it was banned in state schools in the UK.

What really truncates the film, however, is what truncated Lennon’s early experiences and exposes the vulnerable and complex side to the teen: his problematic triangular relationship with his emotionally fragile mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff) and austere Aunt Mimi (Kristan Scott Thomas) that at times pulled him in two different directions, breaking him and mending him.

The Liverpool in Nowehere Boy is authentically drawn; pre-sheen of European Capital of Culture 2008 funding but not drab, post-war 1950s greyscale.  Indeed, colour is used effectively by director and artist Taylor-Wood in her debut feature film.  Red and black recur and take on symbolic significance.  Mimi’s largely black and Julia’s largely red outfits along with their respective black and red front doors visually denote their difference and connote the unstable passion of Julia set against the steady and monolithically stark Mimi.  It’s only when Lennon is talking to his Aunt and refers to Julia as being her sister, that I realise that the two are closely related.  Significantly, as the two sisters bridge their relationship over love for Lennon which they express in very different ways, he is seen wearing a blazer of black and red.

The film explores these very different women as individuals, sisters and how they mother John.  As the credits rolled, John Lennon’s real recording of ‘Mother’ sounds raw and has, due to the 97 minutes that preceded it, taken on a deeper meaning.

Backdrops of Strawberry Fields – a children’s home where, without his aunt Mimi, Lennon may well have ended up – Calderstones Park, Allerton Golf Course and Lennon’s school Quarry Bank (down to its red and yellow striped tie) create a real sense of place that is accurate.  The gold-rimmed drinking glasses, the broom handle bass and washboard of Lennon’s early skiffle band and the ’50s soundtrack root the film in time, while the humour I would argue is timeless.  When Mimi asks for Earl Gray in a café she is told that she is confusing the place with Buckingham Palace.

One of Taylor-Wood’s most famous works is a short film of David Beckham sleeping and it was unfortunate that at the screening I attended, a man a few rows behind me had fallen asleep.  I know he had fallen asleep because at the film’s sudden, tragic apotheosis as the audience gasped in shock, the man snored.  Loudly.  I couldn’t help but laugh. Loudly.  The lady in front turned and shot me ‘the look’ that Mimi would have been proud of!