Nowhere Boy (2009)

Weinstein Company

Aaron Johnson as a young John Lennon in “Nowhere Boy,” directed by Sam Taylor-Wood.

Lennon’s Teenage Years: Rocking and Roiling
At its most obvious, the title of “Nowhere Boy,” a prettily photographed melodrama about a tumultuous period in John Lennon’s adolescence, is a reference to his song “Nowhere Man.” Included in the Beatles’ 1965 album “Rubber Soul,” the masterwork that pointed to new horizons (“This was the departure record,” Ringo Starr said), it has lyrics worthy of Samuel Beckett (“He’s a real nowhere man/Sitting in his nowhere land”) and a strong melancholic undertow. The song is often seen as autobiographical and, somewhat repellently, its title has been used to describe both Lennon and his killer, Mark David Chapman.

Lennon would have been 70 on Saturday, which partly explains the release of “Nowhere Boy,” if not its existence. Directed by Sam Taylor-Wood, the film opens with a 15-year-old John (the older-looking, appealing Aaron Johnson) gleefully running down an empty passageway before falling out of the frame and waking up in his bed at home in Liverpool. This visual would feel overly obvious if Ms. Taylor-Wood lingered too long on it. But she moves through her metaphors and material efficiently, and quickly sketches John’s home life, with its joys and challenges. One look at his Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas, just right), with her brisk dismissals and pursed lips, and you know this boy aches for a bosom to lie on.

That bosom soon comes heaving into the picture, attached to the ripe, evocatively quivering figure of John’s mother, Julia (a very good Anne-Marie Duff). For much of his life, John has been raised by his Aunt Mimi and dearly loved Uncle George (David Threlfall), a man given to big smiles and silly noises. But after a traumatic death in the family, John seeks out Julia, initiating an emotionally volatile, erotically charged relationship that disturbs, provokes, repels and inspires him. “Do you know what rock ’n’ roll is?” Julia asks him on one of their outings. What, her son asks, wide-eyed. “Sex,” Julia smiles, her hips bumping and swaying to “Rocket 88” (“Gals will ride in style/Movin’ all along”).

The film’s best and boldest move is how it brings maternal love and sexual desire into play with artistic longing and youthful ambition. As Mimi unsmilingly goes about running the house that John takes for granted, Julia shares her love of music with John, a love that takes on a pointed, complex erotic charge in a sequence that begins with mother and son listening to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins yowling “I Put a Spell on You.” The film cuts to a close-up of one of John’s hands, his fingers moving rhythmically, and then to an earlier scene of him having sex with a schoolmate, an explicitly pleasurable interlude that Ms. Taylor-Wood punctuates with a shock cut of him later being caned at school for an infraction.