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BaftaBaby 
"Always entranced by cinema."
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 Posted - 26/12/2009 : 12:03:48
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Nowhere Boy
I guess most of the buzz about this dramatization of John Lennon's life before the Beatles revels in the speculation of when 1st-time features director Sam Taylor-Wood and Aaron Johnson got it on. She's twice his age and they're now engaged.
He's a maturing former child star, far more experienced in drama than Turner prize winning conceptual artist Taylor-Wood. Only they know when their professional relationship wound up in nookie-land, but what's undeniable is Johnson's screen command as the emerging rock legend.
The film covers the period before the Beatles trolled off to Hamburg to launch their seminal career. Based on the memoirs of Lennon's half-sister Julia, the film tries to demystify John's complex family relationships, primarily those between his bi-polar mother Juia and his aunt Mimi who raised him.
Whether John ever truly recovered from the pain and confusion or was able to channel most of it into his music is for us to conclude.
What Taylor-Wood, and especially the three main actors do, is shower us with scenes simmering with repressed and misdirected raw emotion, leavened with a wit you feel captures post-war Liverpool.
In that sense Taylor-Wood is driven by the transition from grey wartime austerity to a world that promised color and technology and a morality keen to shed its metaphorical corsets. And, of course, to a world destined to change the direction of popular music.
More than a match for Johnson's charisma -- which has more than a whiff of Caine's Alfie -- both Anne-Marie Duff and Kristen Scott-Thomas as Julia and Mimi strike you like lightning.
But perhaps contributing more than anyone to the film's success in truth and conviction is Matt Greenhalgh's screenplay. Fresh from his powerful Control, dramatising Ian Curtis's life and pain in music, he not only handles Lennon's similar journey with empathy, but brings shape and structure to real life.
Whether, like me, you rate Lennon & McCarthy alonside Mick Jagger as the sine qua nons of popular music in the last half of the 20th century, this is a poignant, exacting film which you will feel before you begin to analyze.
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SixFourian 
"Four ever European"
The European Union
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Posted - 16/02/2010 : 18:28:10
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Nowhere Boy
I hadn't heard about the relationship between Taylor Wood and Johnson. That's quite an age gap, but good luck to them I guess.
It's hard to be objective about how good this is because of the subject matter, but I really enjoyed it and found all the performances convincing and touching. Johnson is also an extremely good physical fit for Lennon.
Quite a few facts seems to have been twisted for the film, which annoyed me a bit when I looked into the details afterwards, but 5/5 for now. |
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Nowhere Boy
