Nowhere Boy

Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy opened in 2009, her directorial debut after a long career as one of the most internationally prominent contemporary visual artists. It made a leading man of Aaron Taylor-Johnson, then nineteen, who would later marry Taylor-Wood, in 2012. Matt Greenhalgh adapted the screenplay from Julia Baird's memoir Imagine This: Growing Up With My Brother John Lennon.

1950s Liverpool. The teenage John Lennon (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) lives with his strict aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas) in Mendips, the suburban house where she has raised him since his mother gave him up. When his mother, Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), comes back into his life from another part of Liverpool, where she has been living with her new partner, John is drawn into both households over several years. It is Julia who introduces him to American rock and roll records, and the film follows his slow formation as a musician from there. Thomas Brodie-Sangster appears as the young Paul McCartney and Sam Bell as the young Stuart Sutcliffe.

It is a biographical drama and a period reconstruction of Liverpool, and also a sustained study of the family dynamic behind the preoccupations, musical and personal, that stayed with Lennon all his life. Seamus McGarvey's photography of late-1950s Liverpool, Alison Owen's production design and the central performances add up to a film that has aged unusually well as British coming-of-age cinema.