Nowhere Boy: Taylor- Wood gets conventional

The relationship between director Sam Taylor-Wood, 42, and her 19-year-old leading man and fiancé Aaron Johnson has dominated much of the publicity for the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy. But the film has also been hailed as an accessible, astute and confident portrait of Lennon the artist as a young man.
 
Many critics have been surprised at how conventional the film is. In comparison to impressionistic feature films by fellow artists-turned-directors - for instance, Steve McQueen's Hunger and Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Taylor-Wood plays it safe, keeping within the confines of a traditional biopic. There is a chronological plot, reliable narrator, authentic early 60s production sets and good performances from Johnson, Kristin Scott Thomas (Lennon's Aunt Mimi) and Anne-Marie Duff (Lennon's absent mother).
 
She may be a fashionable video artist and photographer, but Taylor-Wood has done something "unexpectedly unfashionable", says the Times critic Wendy Ide, and it works. "While Nowhere Boy... is not the most daring or experimental piece of work you'll see, it is warm, involving and very human."

Music and the meeting between the boys who became The Beatles take a back seat to the relationships between Lennon and the important women in his life: his free-spirited mother who abandoned him and his stern Aunt Mimi who raised him. As Time Out's Dave Calhoun notes: "Even the early bonding of John with a more fresh-faced Paul (Thomas Sangster) is explained by the loss, in one way or another, of their respective mothers."
 
WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING:Wendy Ide, the Times: "In this solidly middle-brow picture, evocative production design and eloquent use of colour - Mimi stern in beige and brown; Julia riotous in red and orange - hints at Taylor-Wood's artistic background. But the impressive performances suggest that the most useful talent that she brings to field as a film-maker is a gift for working magic with actors." (Verdict: 4/5 stars.)

Nigel Andrews, the Financial Times: "No one can entice life and contour from the pedestrian story structuring, the here-it-comes dialogue (Paul to John: "If we're gonna do this, we should write our own stuff") or from scenes of suburban sturm und drang suggestive of a humourless Hancock's Half Hour."
(Verdict: 2/5 stars.)

Dave Calhoun, Time Out: "Taylor-Wood's background might be in video art but her approach to cinema is fundamentally different. She offers a conservative package with the odd radical flourish. Some of her choices, such as following Lennon and a pal as they ride on the top of a bus, are populist, even jarring, and suggest that she may not have fully found her own language on this first attempt." (Verdict: 4/5 stars.)

Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian: "Aaron Johnson gives a perfectly decent performance as Lennon, and if he seems a little out of his depth - well, maybe that's because Lennon himself was out of his depth at this stage in his life. Inevitably, the action centres on John - and Julia and Mimi, who are, by rights, the movie's real stars, get relegated to supporting roles. Nonetheless, this is a handsome film made with real flair."  (Verdict: 3/5 stars.) ·