Please don’t hurt me. I don’t hate the Beatles. I just don’t care about them. I like their music, but any songs that I have by them are purely by accident. My mom felt so passionately about the Beatles, the Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan, etc. that I felt about them the same way that I feel about Robert DeNiro. Everybody likes them. They’ll be fine. So I don’t have to care, and I’ll look for someone that people may over look or ignore. I am well aware that one day it may strike me that I have wasted my entire life by not completely immersing myself in their glory and wonder and I may rectify the situation by buying a boxed set and playing the Beatles until the day I die, but that day hasn’t come yet. I’m almost 40, and it hasn’t happened, but there is still time. It just seems like a waste of time to gush and adore someone already so beloved by the universe. If Nowhere Boy wasn’t about John Lennon’s teen years, but about some random British teenager, it would have been an excellent Sunday night tv movie with an amazing cast on whatever British channel is closest to Lifetime. Nowhere Boy reminded me of a more conventional Romulus, My Father. A lot of famous men seemed to adore and have vibrant mothers with undiagnosed mental disabilities. If you do watch Nowhere Boy, yes, the actor who plays Lennon’s stepfather is the same actor who played the Governor on The Walking Dead. While I was watching Nowhere Boy, I wondered why I kept expecting his stepfather to be awful, but he was just an ordinary man not too thrilled with suddenly having to deal with an obnoxious teenage boy appearing unexpectedly and taking away your wife’s attention from you and your daughters. David Morrissey is just memorable enough for me to think that he is evil, but not memorable enough for me to remember why. Kristin Scott-Thomas is in it, which explains why Nowhere Boy ended up in my queue because she is the best. The whole cast is excellent, but honestly if you’ve watched one story of a child angry with his parents for abandoning him, not giving enough love, etc., you have seen them all. Cue Iron Man 3 lines.
POSSIBLE SPOILERS
The main thing that distinguished Nowhere Boy from other films about children dealing with poor parenting or from its Lifetime movie counterparts was that it briefly depicted John’s relationship with his mother as if she was his girlfriend. I’m not suggesting that is a good thing, but it was certainly notable albeit hopefully inaccurate.
