Nowhere Boy – 5

On my personal scorecard of movies with the most gratuitous scenes of characters smoking, there is a new leader: Nowhere Boy. Scarcely a scene goes by without someone, old or young, fingering a cigarette. This factoid is of added interest, if not relevance, because director Sam Taylor-Wood happens to be the artist who created the video long shown in the Chambers Hotel lounge of the mixed-race group sitting in a bar with no perceptible movement – except for the ash at the end of a cigarette. Blink at the wrong time and your five minutes of waiting to see it fall are wasted.
There’s not that much to miss in this movie about John Lennon’s ‘youth,’ either. I use quotes, because Aaron Johnson, in a wonderfully natural performance, appears much closer to 24 than 17. Kristin Scott-Thomas, by contrast, uses one acting tic after another. There is no one, except perhaps the young Paul McCartney, we really care about, and the tortured relationships among John, his mother and aunt do little to explain the artist or the person that John became, which is the only conceivable reason for this movie’s existence.
By coincidence, a day later I was reading Keith Richards’s description of how the Rolling Stones were formed, which made the glib hookups of John, Paul and George in this film seem even shallower.