A friend of mine, Michael Schuster, pointed me to this, the trailer for Nowhere Boy, an upcoming biopic about the teenage years of John Lennon:
Aaron Johnson, whom I’ve never heard of, plays the young Lennon, and Thomas Sangster plays Paul McCartney. While Sangster doesn’t look especially much like McCartney, Johnson, particularly when he puts on the thick glasses Lennon wore in his teenaged years, does look a fair bit like Lennon. Lennon’s Aunt Mimi is played by Kristin Scott-Thomas. I see, at IMDb, that David Morrissey is playing Bobby Dykins, the father of Lennon’s half sister Julia Baird.
The film premiered yesterday at the London Film Festival. It’s due out in the UK in December, in the US sometime next year. The Telegraph gave the film four stars, the Guardian gave it three. Peter Bradshaw writes in the Guardian: “[Director Sam] Taylor-Wood interestingly begins her film with the opening, jangling chord from A Hard Day’s Night, left hanging in a protracted silence until its potential for implied menace and even tragedy has been allowed to float free. It’s a witty opening, but apart from pointed references to ‘nowhere’ in the script and in the title, to a glimpse of Strawberry Field children’s home and to a schoolbook doodling of ‘Walrus,’ [screenwriter Matt] Greenhalgh notably avoids cute prophetic touches.”
He also writes: “It’s a handsomely made film, with a very game lead performance from Johnson, hampered perhaps only by the fact that Lennon is really a rather callow figure at this stage; unlike, say, the more interesting, more grownup Lennon that Ian Hart played in Iain Softley’s 1994 film Backbeat.”
I’ll have to look for this when it comes out next year. The trailer has a rather nice feel.
ETA (11-2-09): The Guardian has a lengthy article on the making of the film. Well worth reading.