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91By the end of Nowhere Boy, you'll feel you know John Lennon better than you ever did.
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90It's a measure of how good a film Nowhere Boy is that it would be compelling even if it were the story of the formative years of a boy named Joe Brown.
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88We learn that the emotional roller coaster of his formative years probably contributed to the complexity of his lyrics.
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88It's strange enough to be raised by your aunt. For young John Lennon, things get stranger still when he finds himself dating his mother.
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88It paints a complex picture of strained familial relations and a poignant look at the wounds inflicted on a sensitive soul by an unreliable parent.
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88Nowhere Boy is too astutely written and directed to go to predictably melodramatic extremes.
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80Scott Thomas' delicate, ferocious performance captures a woman quietly at war with herself, who begins to realize that her vision of respectability may not fit the remarkable young man in her care.
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80There are so many ways in which Nowhere Boy, an emotionally raw and yet raucous, rockin' riff on John Lennon's turbulent teenage years, is such an entertaining piece of nostalgia.
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80The maternal triangle is pretty well handled too, giving a good sense of where Lennon came by all that exuberance and melancholy.
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75We get little sense of his interior life, what was going on in his head as school, girlfriends and music were competing for his attention and music was winning out. His drive is suggested, but never really felt in the performance.
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75Although this is a film about the influential women in Lennon's life, it succeeds equally in its evocation of the family Lennon built among his boyhood mates.
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75Johnson doesn't resemble, much less embody, Lennon, but he does catch his distinctive glint of mischief tinged with pain. Duff and Scott Thomas are both exceptional, revealing how John's relationship with these two clashing sisters marked his character.
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75Nowhere Boy is great at depicting the birth of Lennon's love for his art.
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75Taylor-Wood stresses the universals rather than the specifics of John's youth. So don't go expecting a Fab Four origin story. The word Beatles is never uttered. But do go.
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75To watch Nowhere Boy is to appreciate anew both the anger that drove Lennon and the strength of character it took for him to overcome it.
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75It's effective but schematic storytelling.
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70Like Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There"-which never once came out and said the name "Bob Dylan"-Nowhere Boy bites its tongue and refuses to say "The Beatles."
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70The baby-faced Thomas Sangster nearly steals the show in the much smaller role of Paul McCartney.
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70The script, adapted by Matt Greenhalgh from a memoir by Lennon's half-sister, Julia Baird, is flagrantly Oedipal; almost every scene between John and his mother is sexually charged. The curse is taken off most of these encounters by Anne-Marie Duff's eloquent work in the mother's role.
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67Nowhere Boy reveals the magnitude of the good women behind the grand icon.
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67It's often flat and dull, and it can be heavy-handed with the little acorn-that-will-yield-the-famous-oak bits that so often dot biographical films about the youthful lives of famous figures.
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67It's a tender, but sometimes untended, portrait of the artist as a young man-and occasionally as a young asshole-that's handsome, dutiful, and finally, a little dull.
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63As sympathetic and well-turned as it is, Nowhere Boy only gives us more mythology.
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60Anchored by a strong central turn, Nowhere Boy crafts entertaining, small-scale drama out of Lennon's huge-sized legend. It just lacks the spark and ambition of its subject.
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60If only the script had been content to stick with its let's-start-a-band verve. Like many a musical biopic, Nowhere Boy wants to explain away the man (as if a song like "In My Life" weren't explanation enough).
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50Strong performances by Kristin Scott Thomas as the stern Aunt Mimi, who raised the future Beatle from the age of 5, and Anne-Marie Duff as his troubled mother heighten the dramatic appeal of what otherwise is quite a dull film.
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50Even with all this talent and earnestness, though, Nowhere Boy still feels indulgent, slight and almost instantly forgettable.
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Lacking the song's raw emotive power, Taylor-Wood's debut feature is a rote coming-of-age tableau that churns through stations of anger, inspiration, reconciliation, McCartney, and Harrison.
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50It's a pleasant-enough creation story to revisit, one weighted down by melodrama and lifted up by some rocking tunes.
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50Nowhere Boy is a surprisingly conventional film - adroit at weaving a time-and-place mood but way too rigid dramatically to bring the Lennon family dynamic to life.
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50A respectable but surprisingly conventional feature-debut effort from Brit artist-turned-helmer Sam Taylor-Wood.
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20Johnson is convincing as a swaggering, jokey Lennon, but the photos of young John, Paul and George that end the movie ultimately have more punch than this bubblegummy montage.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 15 out of 16
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Mixed: 1 out of 16
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Negative: 0 out of 16
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