Rating: * * *
Verdict: Unremarkable biopic of the adolescent Lennon.
It might be about the pre-Fab years of John Winston Lennon, but right from its first scenes Nowhere Boy doesn't shirk from being a movie about a Beatle.
It starts with the famous ringing chord from A Hard Day's Night, over a shot of a young Lennon running through the streets as he will be in 10 years' time. But here he is pursued by no one.
Lennon (Johnson) and a schoolmate bike past the Strawberry Fields orphanage in the next scene, then later that day young John and his Uncle George are hooking up a radio to hear the Goon Show - the comedy troupe that Beatles' producer George Martin honed his recording skills on, and whose humour heavily influenced those cheeky mop-tops.
But all that foreshadowing is also part of the problem of Nowhere Boy.
It wants to lay the foundation stone of the legend but also make a melodrama of his troubled upbringing, and sometimes those elements are at cross-purposes.
It is a surprisingly conventional film, considering debut director Taylor-Wood's art background. That's possibly because it's an adaptation of the book Imagine This: Growing Up With My Brother John Lennon written by his half-sister, Julia Baird. The book itself is a slight and borderline exploitative work, the "growing up with" something of an overstatement.
Scripted by Matt Greenhaigh, who wrote the screenplay for Control about Joy Division singer Ian Curtis based on his widow's Touching from a Distance, Nowhere Boy, thankfully takes some poetic licence with the material.
It certainly captures Lennon's teen turmoil, torn between the stern but protective Aunt Mimi (Scott Thomas), who raised him, and his mother Julia (Duff).
Still unsettled by something in his boyhood, the teen Lennon seeks the free-spirited Julia out.
She is raising her own young family a few streets away, but has the time to be a bad influence on her son, introducing him to rock 'n' roll ("it's about sex" she tells him with the film, overstating some heavy oedipal attraction), giving him a banjo and becoming a backstage groupie to his first band, The Quarrymen.
Along the way Paul and George are drawn into Lennon's orbit, with McCartney (a baby-faced Thomas Sangster) proving the more easy-going and gifted musician, Lennon the rock-star-in-the-making with a nasty streak and anger issues.
But the star double-act of this isn't the songwriting geniuses-in-waiting, but Scott Thomas and Duff as the sisters who made John Lennon the man he was and battled for his love and attention until yet another family tragedy struck.
A perma-smoking Scott Thomas is terrific as Mimi, capturing the protective love beneath her dour exterior, while Duff gives Julia a volatile mix of vivaciousness and anxiety.
Johnson doesn't much look like Lennon and his performance can't carry the weight of expectation - or impersonation - upon it, unlike say Ian Hart's in the fine early years Beatle drama Backbeat.
But Nowhere Boy still gets there in the end, where, just as inevitably and obviously as A Hard Day's Night rings out in the beginning, Lennon's Mother howls over the closing credits.
Cast: Aaron Johnson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Anne-Marie Duff Director: Sam Taylor-Wood
Rating: M (sex scenes & offensive language)
Running time: 97 mins
