Nowhere boy

Former child-actor Aaron Johnson had a tough task in Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy. He had to look, sound and emote the way a global audience would expect John Lennon to have done as a teenager. Yet the biopic had to be faithful to the realities of Lennon's early years, which were those of a self-defensively sardonic lower-middle-class Liverpool boy with a troubled absent mother (Anne-Marie Duff) and over-loving guardian, his Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas).

Perfect casting for those two key female characters secured the movie's success. While they are on the screen, Johnson need do nothing more than look easily impressionable, egocentric and unformed. His mother teaches him how to play the banjo and appreciate Elvis; he's acquired his sarcastic tongue and superiority complex from Mimi. His father was an unknown factor in Lennon's character.

Matt Greenhalgh's tactful screenplay and Taylor-Wood's modest direction and tight editing focus not so much on Lennon as the home lives and social environment that fostered his self-conscious serio-comic songwriting genius and subsequent egomania. In 1955 in Liverpool, his adolescence offers a microcosmic study of a generation and a country finding itself leaping into unknown territory.

The future Lennon is visible in the older Johnson's personality, but it's hard to imagine adult versions of McCartney and Harrison emerging from the other, younger cast members. All that really matters, though, as the movie's postscript suggests, is the character of Mimi for whom Scott Thomas delivers another triumphant performance of a unique conflicted woman. In English as well as French movies, she's a unique screen presence. Far from a classic beauty, she's an angular, bony Lorelei whose eyes and body language convey bewitching depth.