Sissy Spacek’s virtuoso performance as Loretta Lynn in “Coal Miner’s Daughter” is somewhat legendary, and it’s not difficult to see why. She has that magical performer’s ability to draw us into the artist’s story, making us understand what motivated the country singer to create art and how she translated her life into song. Aaron Johnson, star of Sam Taylor-Wood’s new John Lennon biopic “Nowhere Boy,” lacks this sort of charisma. A story chronicling Lennon’s formative years, “Nowhere Boy” is the kind of conventional, paint-by-numbers biopic disguised under the thin veil of pop vulgarization, and hunky dreamboat Johnson surely can’t alleviate the film’s ponderousness.
We first meet the young Lennon at age 15 while he’s living under his authoritarian maternal aunt (Kristin Scott-Thomas) in suburban Liverpool. After a sudden death in the family, Lennon is thrown into angst-ridden flux; the film essentially covers Lennon’s period of teenage rebellion – trysts with various women, skipping school – to the birth of The Quarrymen, Lennon and McCartney’s pre-Beatles musical effort.
Like Julian Schnabel, director of the similarly vacuous biopic “Before Night Falls,” Taylor-Wood’s background is in the visual arts – she soaks the film with shots of sun-dappled waves and facile Freudian dream sequences that aim to reveal something about Lennon’s artistic subconscious. But her images don’t have the poetry of Schnabel’s – even when his picture was a bit empty, there was still something musical about his visuals. Taylor-Wood’s pace is frantic, arrhythmic. “Nowhere Boy” has the slaphappy structure of some melodramatic sitcom elongated for the film medium.
Johnson isn’t the right sort of player for Lennon, either. He’s virtually insufferable in a role that should beg for our sympathy. He embodies Lennon as much as Diana Ross did Billie Holliday (that is, hardly at all), yet even Ross had a certain magnetism in “Lady Sings the Blues.” Johnson, in all his perpetually half-grinning glory, simply isn’t Lennon. Wafting through each scene with his obnoxious hipster glasses, he’s the prettified idealization of what we, in our 21st century indie mindset, would like to perceive as the young John Lennon.
At the emotional center of the film, then, is a bravura performance by Scott-Thomas, who has continually shown herself to be one of our finest screen actresses. There’s a certain pull to her presence that makes us feel for her, even when the character she’s playing is repellent. That icy, steel-coated veneer she layered with such aplomb in “I’ve Loved You So Long” is once again on full display here. As she seethes with anger at Lennon’s post-adolescent disobedience, her eyes, frozen with blue rage, communicate a desperate longing for human contact.
Thankfully, too, Taylor-Wood refuses to elegize her subject as many a Lennon fan-girl would’ve done. Perhaps one of the more tantalizing aspects of her work here is her handling of Lennon’s relationship with his estranged, nonconformist mother (a glorious Anne-Marie Duff). A hyper-sexualized cipher and total free spirit, Julia arouses in John a sexual curiosity he hadn’t discovered beforehand. Taylor-Wood hints at a sort of Oedipal complex on John’s end, suggesting that his attraction to his mother, platonic or otherwise, shaped his view of music. Indeed, Johnson is at his most tolerable when he shares the screen with Duff, whose mere presence lets this stifled film breathe.
Even this mother-son aspect, though, remains a mere suggestion – a hint of something that could’ve been developed further in the hands of a defter auteur. Surely Lennon deserves better.