John Lennon, Revealed And Remembered An Remembered

I come from a generation comfortably acquainted with the “Give Peace a Chance” era of John Lennon, a perennial figure in any college dorm. For this reason, it came as a shock to watch the international beacon of peace curse his mother and ditch school regularly as a youth. Yet both these images surface in director Sam Taylor-Wood’s 2009 biopic “Nowhere Boy,” which chronicles the formative years of the young and troubled John Lennon. British heartthrob Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays the eventual Beatles’ front man and founder as a cheeky and haunted 17-year-old. Hair quaffed in Elvis fanboy glory and always with a quip and a wink, Taylor-Johnson makes reckless youth seem effortless. But it is evident that Lennon’s family life is riddled with dysfunction from one of the first scenes of the film, when his guardian uncle dies unexpectedly, seemingly from alcohol and drugs. At his uncle’s funeral, standing with his widowed aunt Mimi and her friends, John glimpses a woman paying her respects, who quickly leaves upon eye contact with him. A scene later it is revealed to both John and the audience that the woman is John’s estranged mother, Julia. With little explanation as to why Lennon has not known sooner that his aunt’s sister was even still alive (and with no word to Mimi), John sets out the next week to find Julia, a mere walk, as it turns out, from his Liverpool home. Like a budding love affair that flowers too late in life, John and Julia are thrown head over heels into a tumbling, affectionate yet implausible relationship as mother and son who become reacquainted with each other after nearly 15 years of estrangement. Doomed from the start, John and Julia Lennon’s rock ’n’ roll love ballad seems more a coming-of-age tale than a joyous reunion of mother and son. Despite the too-close-for-comfort aura, however, Taylor-Johnson’s John and Anne-Marie Duff’s playful, red-haired Julia stir up an intoxicating chemistry, which drives the emotional narrative of John’s youthful existence. John spends days with Julia who introduces him to the banjo — seemingly his first instrument — rock ’n’ roll and motherly adoration. While Julia’s charm, devotion, and devil-may-care attitude snare John in her affectionate grip, he learns too soon the truth about his childhood and the reason why his aunt and uncle raised him. In perhaps the most poignant and jarring scene of the film, an emotionally stirring Mimi, played by a taciturn but fiercely loving Kristin Scott Thomas, recounts the truth to John as a wan and helpless Julia crumples. The truth does not come as much of a shock, but it does help to fathom the fiercely familial nature of the pop music legend that is John Lennon. Music certainly propels “Nowhere Boy” into a stirring and honest biopic capturing the youth of John Lennon and making clear that music saved him from oblivion. The soundtrack follows some of the most harrowing and heart-rending artists of the 1960s, as well as some live performances from Lennon’s first rag-tag band of school-tied misfits, “The Quarrymen.” While Taylor-Johnson might not closely resemble the bearded face that led a country to seriously consider “bed-ins” during the rage of the Vietnam War, he still reminds the audience of Lennon’s all too humble beginnings in a little house in Liverpool. Soon the Quarrymen-alias-Beatles — now with bandmates Paul and George — take off, and John leaves Mimi and Liverpool for Hamburg to begin a 48-day residency. In the last scene of the movie, John promises Mimi that he will call when he arrives; “…and every week thereafter for the rest of his life,” and as credits roll John walks down the road, just a few short years away from the height of Beatlemania. Cornelia Smith is a college student who grew up in Northwest Connecticut, writes and goes to movies.