Sam Taylor-Wood’s feature debut Nowhere Boy charts the turbulent teenage years of music legend John Lennon, but you wouldn’t know that from the title alone. You could say it’s a missed opportunity to cash in on a household name, but the title is actually a perfect fit; Nowhere Boy is a solid urban drama on its own accord, it doesn’t need to flaunt Lennon’s famed name to be enjoyed. The fact that the young Liverpool lad depicted on-screen goes onto create arguably the most famous band of all time feels almost coincidental.

Nowhere Boy begins on a familiar note; the opening chord of The Beatles song ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. It’s a hint toward the music icon John Lennon (Aaron Johnson) will one day be, but certainly not who he was back in 1955. Living under the roof of his strict Aunt Mimi’s (Kristin Scott Thomas) suburban Liverpool home, 15 year-old John drank heavily, smoked constantly and snuck into the bushes with girls who fell for his rebellious James Dean attitude. After the sudden death of his Uncle, John soon learns that his actual mother, Mimi’s flirtatious younger sister Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), lives a mere block away. Putting aside his feelings of betrayal, John starts to make up for lost time with mother, causing a rift to form between him and his disapproving Aunt.  As tensions rise between the two women in his life, John turns to music for comfort and decides to start up a band, eventually recruiting two wannabe rockers named George Harrison (Sam Bell) and Paul McCartney (Thomas Sangster).

The rest, as they say, is history. Yet the strength of Matt Greenhalgh’s screenplay is that it doesn’t draw too much attention to that fact, avoiding a common problem in music biopics where every scene, every piece of dialogue exists only to propel the movie toward the subject’s eventual rise to fame, as if to suggest their success was always in the cards. While Nowhere Boy does follow a conventional trajectory, it refreshingly exists in the moment, with only a few cringeworthy winks and nods toward the future. Sure, Lennon’s love for music is heavily highlighted throughout, but the dramatic circumstances that resulted in his passion are credibly depicted, aided considerably by Taylor-Wood’s focused, unassuming direction.

Despite looking a bit too old for the role, 19 year-old Aaron Johnson showcases immense talent as the witty, reckless and hot-headed Lennon. Johnson’s multi-layered performance handles each sudden shift in mood with ease, while his strong chemistry with Julia, portrayed by an equally fantastic Anne-Marie Duff, has an unnerving incestuous air to it. Kristin Scott Thomas  tends to overstate the fact she is Julia’s binary opposite as John’s Aunt, although she never goes as far as to lose our sympathy.

No stranger to period films, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey’s (The Hours, Atonement) low-key lensing matches the urban grime of 1950s Britain, which has been faithfully recreated by some immaculate production design. The drama plays out beneath a toe-tapping soundtrack featuring the likes of Elvis (‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’) and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (‘I Put a Spell on You’), which does its part in making Nowhere Boy a gratifying music biopic that is surprisingly humble in its treatment of John Lennon; a man who went on to famously say his band was bigger than Jesus.

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