Nowhere Boy

Directed by Sam Taylor-Wood. Starring Aaron Johnson, Anne-Marie Duff, David Morrissey, David Threlfall, Kristin Scott Thomas 15A cert, lim release, 97 min

SAM TAYLOR-WOOD, hitherto a gallery-based artist of some note, has set herself a significant challenge with her debut feature. Making a film about the early life of an icon such as John Lennon is akin to making a film about the early life of Queen Elizabeth or Santa Claus. It is, thus, no small compliment to say that she has managed to offer us a fresh, mildly surprising portrait of the great man.

The biographical details will, it is true, be familiar to even casual Beatles fans. Abandoned by Julia, his mother, John spent his childhood in petit-bourgeois comfort with his snobbish but essentially decent Aunt Mimi. Although Julia – played well by Anne-Marie Duff as a bipolar proto-bohemian – later came back into John’s life, the relationship never quite made sense. Mimi remained the stable centre of his teens.

By casting the impeccably posh Kristin Scott Thomas as Lennon’s aunt, Taylor-Wood, slyly puts the lie to his later talk of working-class heroes.

Aaron Johnson, in a decent, if unspectacular lead performance, highlights a fragility that – those barmy, self-lacerating Plastic Ono Band tunes noted – rarely showed through the pop star’s sarcastic carapace. For all that, the film belongs to the female characters, poignant in different ways: Julia becoming worryingly sexual with her son; Mimi tortured by a perceived ingratitude.

Shot in unhurried style by our own Seamus McGarvey – unlike Steve McQueen's Hunger, Nowhere Boydoes not look like a film by a former video artist – this charming, slight picture is a convincing picture of a drab England in need of new energies. It seems inconceivable that this callow kid would be a prime instigator of the coming explosion.

Such was the wonder of The Beatles.