Nowhere Boy Review

Pop, as quite a few musicologists have observed, is 'mom': a couple of three letter words with a deep symbiotic relationship. A relationship occasionally verging, as Nowhere Boy suggests, on the inappropriate. From Jim Morrison scandalously acting out the myth of Oedipus in 'The End', to Roger Waters plaintively asking his suffocating matriarch "Do you think she's good enough for me?" in Pink Floyd's The Wall, the history of 'mother love' among male singers is long.

John Lennon, a hierophant among pop's arch-confessors, certainly had his fair share of 'mother issues', as evinced by the White Album's 'Julia', a supremely moving and delicate tribute to his late mother, lyrically enmeshed with a love poem to Yoko Ono. Later, on his debut solo album, he'd give full vent to the peculiarly ambiguous relationship via a full-throated primal scream: "Mother, you had me, but I never had you."

That ambiguity lies at the heart of artist Sam Taylor-Wood's first full-length feature, the first Lennon biopic to brave a fuller excavation of one of pop's saddest back stories, and one of its most complicated psychologies; a man with a distinctly wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am attitude toward the fairer sex, but who'd also refer to Ono as 'Mother.'

As chronicled in the film, we see how the boy Lennon was raised by his aunt, Mary 'Mimi' Smith, who took him in after it was thought that her younger sister was incapable of looking after him properly. In his teens, which is when the film properly begins, he goes on to pinball between the two very different women, the stoic Mimi (a surprisingly well-cast Kristin Scott Thomas, transplanting that glorious sang-froid to Liverpool) and the flighty, possibly manic-depressive Julia (Anne Marie Duff, also excellent). Living just round the corner, and closer to her son's age, Julia buys him his first guitar, and introduces him to rock 'n' roll, before, tragically, she's knocked down and killed by an off-duty drunk-driving policeman when Lennon is 17.