NOWHERE BOY – CATCH IT ( A ) Based upon the early life of Mr. John Lennon, this movie is truly wonderful… best thing about the movie is it's more of a British family drama then changed into totally music extravaganza… AarOn Johnson is undoubtedly the Best young Actor around … His portrayal of john Lennon' s is just incredible…from sweetness, to witness and cockiness… he grapes perfectly on all parts of John Lennon's behavior. Other incredible performance in the movie is by Anne-Marie Duff... She is outstanding, she is so good that I actually forgot that I m watching a movie and she is playing her role... You just want to see her previous work that good she is in this movie...Kristin Scott Thomas gave another great performance... All these three actors make the movie believable and if John Lennon would have been alive today... must be proud of them... In the end 1st time Director Sam Taylor-Wood did an excellent job with the story and movie. I still think about the movie and want to watch all over again.

This biopic of John Lennon, taking his story from his schooldays in Liverpool up until the departure of the nascent Beatles for Hamburg, is an exceptional movie, quite the best I have seen during 2009. The story is beautifully handled from beginning to end and the acting from the three main leads is superb. Aaron Johnson manages to portray Lennon's mixture of cockiness (in more ways than one!), aggression, painful vulnerability, bewilderment and sheer adolescent verve with great sureness of touch. We watch Lennon developing from school-kid into knowing young man, and we literally see a different face at the end of the movie to the one we did at the start. Superb playing by Johnson, brilliantly assisted by that of Kristin Scott Thomas as his Aunt Mimi and Anne-Marie Duff as his mother, Julia. It would have been all too easy to lapse into cliché with this story but this is largely avoided. We get glimpses of Liverpool - an opening on the steps of St George's Hall, a fleeting glimpse of Strawberry Fields, a shot of a ferry on the Mersey - but these glimpses are all we need. And the movie closes not with a rendition of an all too predictable 'Nowhere Man' but a beautifully performed 'In Spite of All the Danger'. They say it's a long way to the top if you wanna rock n' roll; in Nowhere Boy we can see where it, and we, all began.

Aaron Johnson plays the exceedingly vulnerable and budding talented John Lennon in his teen years in Nowhere Boy. This is the story of a young man who glimpsed at the life that Elvis Presley was leading and decided this was for him. Whatever the cost he was not going to be the Nowhere Man he later wrote about.

I remember the early years of the Beatles invasion and if you recall the Fab Five were as carefully packaged as bubblegum teen idols back in those early days. I remember reading back then that John Lennon had been raised by an aunt because his mother had been killed in a traffic accident. To say the least that was certainly a bare bones outline of the events.

When Lennon's father moved out John was raised by Aunt Sylvia and Uncle George played by Kristin Scott-Thomas and David Threlfell. I'm sorry that Threlfell dies early on in the film because we see too little of him, but Scott-Thomas who is the sister of his mother continues to raise him with a loving, but strict hand. Then mother, played by Anne-Marie Duff reenters the picture and the young John Lennon is conflicted to say the least. What goes on between the two sisters and young John is the basis of the story.

The two women have some great parts and we do see Lennon forming his first band called The Quarry Men. Pictures of them at the time will show them trying to imitate American rock and rollers. It was only later that they got the distinctive Beatle look that we all remember.

If you want to continue the story, I highly recommend following this film up with Stephen Dorff's Backbeat which takes the story up where Nowhere Boy leaves off. One thing I did not understand is where Stuart Sutcliffe who was the lead character in Backbeat and Pete Best the original drummer were. They both knew and were involved with Lennon in the early Liverpool years.

I think fans of John Lennon will be pleased with Nowhere Boy and with Aaron Johnson's portrayal of their idol.