jtncsmistad
Legendary musician and founding member of The Beatles John Lennon had a tough life as a kid. An absentee dad and a good time girl mom who left him to grow up with her sister doesn't exactly constitute the perfect childhood. This is the poetic license premise behind the passable slice of life biopic "Nowhere Boy".The lingering question at the end of this examination of Lennon's formative years is "What if?" We'll never know. But then if things had been any different we may have never known the greatest rock group in history either.Yeah, yeah, yeah.
italo505
Aaron Johnson stars as the young John Lennon who is always causing trouble for riding on the roof of a bus, getting into brawls with bullies, or flashing girls in school, or missing class and never paying attention in class whenever he decided to attend class (it sounds a lot like me, actually LOL) and lives with his Aunt Mimi (the wonderful Kristin Scott Thomas in a superb supportive role here). Little did I know about his troubled childhood and I was taken aback when I saw what unraveled during Nowhere Boy: John didn't actually know his mother and grew up thinking that she was somewhere far, far away along with his father and was left to Aunt Mimi's devices to raise this rebellious yet lovable character. I love how the film star never tries to imitate or glorify John Lennon in any way, there are some acts that John does to his Aunt Mimi, his friends and even his mother during this film that made my jaw drop.Speaking of his mother Julia, in his search for her it's a friend of him (or was he his cousin, I can't quite remember) that tells John where she is, his cousin shows him that Julia is actually at walking distance from where he's always lived, a few blocks from Aunt Mimi's home. The first meeting John ever had with Julia was awkward: a sixteen year old confident boy suddenly becomes very sheepish and vulnerable in front of your very eyes, it was touching watching John melt in the sight of his real mother whom he had given up on, the thought of seeing her was beyond belief and was more than a dream come true, it was as if the boy had hit the jackpot and was suddenly in the presence of his other half, a part of him that had been ripped from him when she was out of his life for 12 years or so and suddenly he felt the urge to catch up with Julia.Julia, as it turns out, had remarried and had 2 daughters and lived her life as if she had never had a son before. Upon seeing John at her door you could tell that a dark episode in her life had returned to haunt her yet she didn't let it show to John and they began a strange and wonderful bond where they would go on dates to the movies or buying records or out and about. She also introduced him to music and her love to play music. It was Julia that awoke a part of John that was always there yet he never knew it until he met Julia.The real drama begins on John's 17th birthday when Julia decided to throw a party in his honor. The drunken teenagers playing rock'n'roll music while John was being his bad self in spite of his mother, he started to resent the fact that she pretty much abandoned him without a trace and the fact that they had lived so close all this time and never had bothered to be part of his life when he needed his mother the most. Aaron Johnson does a great job in containing all that anger and rage inside John for as long as he could in order to explode in front of the camera when he finally confronts Julia in her front yard and demands that she tells him what was the reason she abandoned him with his Aunt Mimi and never looked back.And that is probably the most heart breaking moment when, upon coming back home with his Aunt Mimi along with Julia, that he learns the awful truth that he was seeking all his life: when John was a little boy, around 5 or 6 years old, he'd watched his parents get in a huge argument that turned a bit violent and John was given a choice: You want to go with mommy or daddy? Just thinking of the scene bring chills down my spine, how can you have a young boy make such a horrible choice? What kind of parent would ever do that to their child? Having come from a broken home myself, I had to make that same hard decision but it was my own decision to go with my mother. Nobody had sat down and explained what was wrong with my family but I wasn't five years old trying to make an adult decision. To think that John had to make this hard decision at such a tender age was just too much to bear. Then we get to see how Aunt Mimi came to John's rescue when she witnessed Julia and her husband get into a heated argument and took it upon herself to get this innocent boy out of harm's way and hid him in her own home where she would raise this kid as her own. It's the ultimate sacrifice that a woman can ever make, a sacrifice of love for a young boy who has no knowledge of what's happening in front of his very eyes. John's father apparently took off to Germany to never return again while Julia came to see John at Mimi's house. That was the haunting image of Julia knocking on their door, the image that will forever be stuck in John's memory and one that will keep coming back as if it were a horrible nightmare, a troubling dream that John can never quite put together until this very moment. It's a scene so emotionally charged and performed quite well that I needed a few moment to contain my own tears, it's certainly the best scene in NOWHERE BOY.
s t
I really enjoyed this film which I watched at the "Woolton" in south Liverpool which is a small independent cinema located in the heart of the area featured in the film of John Lennon's adolescence.I thought the film convincingly conjured up the period which I lived through myself. I also bought into the tension between the characters in certain scenes.Best of all was the casting of Aaron Johnson as Lennon. He gives a truly brilliant portrayal of the complex man, disturbing in some places, laugh out loud funny in others.This is proper film making with a clear narrative and character development in situations that should lead you through a range of emotions by the time it ends.
