Bob Ellis’ Rough Cut

Bob Ellis on Nowhere Boy, Bright Star, Broken Embraces, The Informant! and Did You Hear About the Morgans?

A far-off time of inconsummate petting is well recalled in Sam Taylor Wood’s Nowhere Boy, about John Lennon’s lace-curtain suburban Liverpool youth, a disturbing, full-hearted biopic that resembles, correctly, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving and A Taste of Honey from the same era. It shows him at 14 finding his birth mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), who’s been living round the corner all the while, at the funeral of Bill, the only dad he can remember, and getting to know her.She’s promiscuous, talented, difficult, game, stupid sometimes, verbally witty like him. She teaches him the banjo; she goofs around with him. She is his mate, as Mimi (Kristin Scott-Thomas), her sister and his stepmother, childless, widowed and coldly grieving now, never was. He moves in with her but Bobby (David Morrissey), her bulky, thin-moustached fancy-man, hates him, undermines him and soon evicts him. He goes back to Mimi, stuffs up at school, gets suspended, conceals it from Mimi, forms a rock band. Meets Paul McCartney. Julia hangs round the band applauding and dancing, like a groupie. She’s game for anything, even incest. She becomes an embarrassment. She must be bought off.

And suddenly she is killed, run over on a suburban street. Paul McCartney has lost his mum too, and the two boys bond. The band changes its membership, and its name, and soon sets out for Hamburg. Remembrances of his father’s desertion when he was four fill up some painful flashbacks.