Alright, here’s a trailer we’re much more excited about: Sam Taylor-Wood’s young John Lennon biopic “Nowhere Boy.” Or were excited anyhow…
Interestingly enough, there’s no Beatles or Lennon music in this one and the first song we hear is Jay Hawkins’ classic, “I Put A Spell On You,” though it does feature voice recordings of Lennon reflecting back on his childhood. But we must say it doesn’t look great and rather much like a conventional melodrama/em0-teeny bopper coming-of-age tale (lots of teen angst in here). Not sure what that final, indie-rock-ish song is at the end of the trailer (god, does everyone sound like the Arcade Fire now? ) but it’ll make some cringe and it’s pretty antithetical to anything John Lennon related.
“Nowhere Boy” stars Aaron Johnson (Lennon), Thomas Sangster (Paul McCartney), Kristen Scott Thomas (Lennon’s surrogate mother, his Aunt Mimi) David Morrissey, Anne-Marie Duff and it was written by Matt Greenhalgh, the screenwriter who penned the Ian Curtis/Joy Division biopic “Control.”
The film is playing the London Film Festival currently and we should have a review for you shortly. One of the first reviews that has hit is from TimeOutLondon, and they give it four out of five stars and say it’s, a “pleasing, invigorating success that sidesteps the music and the future to explore a moving and instructive story about the making of a young man.”
We’ve heard otherwise from a friend in New York that has seen it with their own eyes, but we’re still going in with an open mind and like anything, need to see it for ourselves to have a final opinion.
Don’t be surprised to find that instead of a release date at the end of this one it says, “coming soon,” which is pretty much a guarantee it’s not going to hit theaters in 2009. It’s a Weinstein Company film and it seems they’re not going to push it for Oscar this year, so that means they’ll bump it instead.