Nowhere Boy   Starring: Aaron Johnson, Thomas Sangster, Anne-Marie Duff and Kristin Scott Thomas Icon Home Entertainment RRP: £17.99 ICON10200 Certificate: 15 Available 10 May 2010

There are few musicians more totemic than John Lennon - tortured genius, international super star, working class hero, musical innovator... he has come to represent them all. Everyone knows the story of his band, The Beatles, but less well know - at least until now - is the story of his early life aside, perhaps, from the fact that he was brought up by his aunt Mimi.

Nowhere Boy, the debut feature from artist Sam Taylor-Wood, sets out to fill in the missing detail, in the processes adding flesh to some bare historical bones. And within these limits it succeeds. The actor Aaron Johnson looks like the young Lennon, albeit older and beefier than he should, and Kristin Scott Thomas makes for a convincing Mimi - strict, up tight but fundamentally a caring woman, picking up the pieces left by her wayward sister.

Anne-Marie Duff’s Julia, the mother that abandoned the young Lennon, is, however, another matter. She looks too young for the part and struggles with a script that strongly suggests that she had a sexual attraction to her son. The shots of rolling waves is frankly a visual metaphor too far.

But the weakest part of the movie isn’t the quassi-erotic mother/son relationship, it’s the script. We are given far too little back-story about Julia, and Lennon’s character remains thin and worryingly unconvincing. There simply isn’t enough spark or anger in him.

At least Thomas Sangster’s Paul McCartney looks the right age - if alarmingly underfed - even if he’s given little to do or say that suggests the basis for his friendship with John. And it’s these sorts of omissions that fragment a movie that teeters on the brink of greatness but which ultimately fails to deliver.

There’s not enough raw emotion or, surprisingly, music to make Nowhere Boy catch fire and there’s not enough narrative detail to make the characters real. Witness David Morrissey’s screen time - his part as Julia's husband [and father to John's half-sisters] is so thin that it could have been anyone saying the lines, and that’s clearly not the actor’s fault.

I wanted to like this film but came away frustrated as it hints at what it could have been but time after time fails to make the grade.

6

Anthony Clark