Critic Reviews

By the end of Nowhere Boy, you'll feel you know John Lennon better than you ever did.

It'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.

It's strange enough to be raised by your aunt. For young John Lennon, things get stranger still when he finds himself dating his mother.

We learn that the emotional roller coaster of his formative years probably contributed to the complexity of his lyrics.

It paints a complex picture of strained familial relations and a poignant look at the wounds inflicted on a sensitive soul by an unreliable parent.

Nowhere Boy is too astutely written and directed to go to predictably melodramatic extremes.

There 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.

The maternal triangle is pretty well handled too, giving a good sense of where Lennon came by all that exuberance and melancholy.

Scott 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.

Although 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.