Nowhere Boy (2009)

Sam Taylor-Johnson's Nowhere Boy arrives with the modest ambition of showing us the teenage John Lennon before the myth hardened. It succeeds at that and little else, which is not a complaint. The film sits in working-class Liverpool, a place of cramped terraces and clipped vowels, and it treats that setting as texture rather than argument. Poverty here is a condition of life, not a thesis. Nobody stands on a doorstep to explain that the system is rigged. Aunt Mimi buys the guitar, the lads form the Quarrymen, and we are left to draw our own conclusions about the postwar British arrangement. This is a restraint contemporary cinema has largely forgotten how to manage.

The women carry the emotional weight. Kristin Scott Thomas and Anne-Marie Duff do the heavy lifting as the two forces pulling the boy apart, and the film grants them real interiority. It manages this without ever reaching for a manifesto. Theirs is a domestic war of love and grievance, conducted in kitchens and on staircases, and it stays there. We get no speeches about the condition of women in 1950s England, no knowing glances toward the audience. The same holds for the film's treatment of history. It compresses and rearranges the record where drama demands it, a choice Beatles scholars have duly noted, but it does not set out to overturn the accepted story. It merely polishes it.

What remains is a small, well-acted picture about a boy, two mothers, and a guitar. It has no interest in instructing anyone. That absence of instruction is, in the end, the most notable thing about it. The film trusts its performances and its period detail to carry the load, and they mostly do. A viewer hoping for a lecture will leave hungry. A viewer hoping for a decent drama about the making of a complicated young man will be fed adequately, if not richly.