Nowhere Boy - Sam Taylor Wood
23/12/09
The opening chord of A Hard Day’s Night sounds. A young John Lennon runs across the steps of Liverpool Town Hall as If pursued by fans. The chord has what Ian MacDonald[1] calls ‘a significance in Beatles lore matched only by the concluding E major of A Day in the Life, the two opening and closing the group's middle period of peak creativity.’ The introduction is typical of the way in which Sam Taylor Wood’s film works. A sound that comes from nowhere.
Half-way through Nowhere Boy, Lennon fronts his first band – The Quarry Men – at the Woolton Garden Fete. As the skiffle group stand anxiously on the back of a lorry with their amateur instruments and Elvis-a-like hairstyles, a photographer takes a picture and shrugs. To him, it is just another image of a garden fete. To us, it is an iconic image of the beginnings of The Beatles.
Blink and you will miss it. What the film does well is underplay its own history. Lennon cycles past the gates to Strawberry Fields. He is refused entry to the Cavern Club after too many drinks. He draws walruses in the margins of his jotter. Nowhere Boy keeps its Beatles trivia in the margins and lets the story of Lennon’s early years tell itself without being too weighed down by his future.
Sam Taylor Wood’s first feature film is ambitious in it traditionalism. We are transported to Liverpool in the 1950s. A place of post-war austerity. Lennon smokes woodbines. He listens to the radio with his Uncle George. He is an unruly schoolboy, more interested in the girls at Quarry Bank School, than his education. He is no stranger to the headmaster’s office or, indeed, the cane.
Lennon, like Liverpool, looks out to water. He downs last night’s leftover pint the morning after on a bench beside the Mersey. He dances down Blackpool promenade with his long-lost mother, Julia, during their brief reconciliation. He is often backgrounded by the horizon. As if, literally, the sky’s the limit. Aaron Johnson, in his breakthrough role, captures both his arrogance and insecurity.
Anne-Marie Duff and Kristin Scott Thomas are well cast as the two matriarchs in Lennon’s life. Julia, estranged but irresistible, tells her son that ‘rock and roll’ means sex. Aunt Mimi is his guardian who drinks Earl Grey and listens to Rachmaninov. Lennon spends much of his time slamming Aunt Mimi’s front gate shut as he storms out of her house but he always ends up coming home.
Aunt Mimi is the gravity to Julia’s whirlwind. Julia pays a blind eye to her son’s truancy. Aunt Mimi receives letters of concern from the school. She buys his first guitar from Gretty’s. She encourages his early rehearsals with young Paul McCartney in her porch. She waits up for Lennon when he stays out too late. So when he asks her to sign his passport form before sailing to Hamburg in 1961 she is both parent and guardian. This is the closest we come to a kiss.
When Lennon learns how to play the banjo at Julia’s house, we see him strum in real-time as children run around him and his mother irons in fast-forward.
There are echoes of Taylor Wood's video work Still Life (2001) in which a bowl of fruit, painterly redolent, rapidly turns mouldy and is devoured by flies.
Like the bowl of fruit, relationships between Lennon and his family soon sour.
Blackpool Tower’s long shadow hangs over Lennon as a recurring motif from his childhood. He has memories of his mother and father arguing over custody at a dingy B & B as a donkey strolls past and his Aunt Mimi watches from an adjacent tearoom, waiting to pick up the pieces, the child. It is this flashback to the turning point in his early life when Lennon chose his father and his mother walked away, which allows Taylor Wood's most visual licence.
The film radiates colour at a time when music stopped sounding black and white. In some ways, Aunt Mimi is monochrome and Julia is Technicolor. The iconic image of The Quarry Men is taken in black and white. It is interesting to note that after Paul and George joined the band, images of the group began to appear in colour. It is, as if, The Beatles are still a developing photograph and Taylor Wood has picked the most under-exposed chapter of their history.
The dialogue can sound stilted and implausible. Matt Greenhalgh, who also wrote Control, is sometimes guilty of embellishing fact for the convenience of a Lennon-esque one-liner. Before her fateful journey home, Julia is told by one of The Quarry Men that the group have a gig at The Abattoir. ‘Don’t play there,’ she replies ‘You’ll get slaughtered.’ Then she crosses the road into the path of an oncoming police car. These are unlikely to be Julia’s last words. But it is perhaps an appropriate prefacing of her untimely death with the same dry and caustic humour that Lennon would have to develop to deal with it.
A distraught but unravelling Lennon admonishes his band mates for crying at the funeral. ‘We’re supposed to be a rock n roll band.’ He head butts his best friend at the wake. He punches Paul McCartney in the mouth for playing his late mother’s banjo. ‘It’s not fucking band practice’. The tender embrace they share afterwards, two men who lost their mothers too early, is an emotional hinge in the film, a rare moment of reflection, of stillness, of silence, of truth.
This is a moving, visually poetic account of Lennon’s early life and offers some interesting insight into the character we now know. His acerbic wit. His complicated relationship with women. His opinion of his own talent. At one point the headmaster tells him he is going nowhere and Lennon replies; ‘Is nowhere for the geniuses? Because then I probably do belong there.’ One senses that even if Lennon hadn’t actually said this, he would have thought it.
[1] MacDonald, Ian (2005). Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties (Second Revised ed.). London: Pimlico
Nowhere Boy opens on Boxing Day and will be screened at Broadway from 27th December to 7 January inclusive
Michael Pinchbeck wrote The White Album for Nottingham Playhouse in 2007
