Happy Birthday, John Lennon: Why ‘Nowhere Boy’ is Still the Best Beatles Biopic

For years, filmmakers have been fascinated by The Beatles. Every aspect of those four men’s lives has been scrutinized, imagined, re-imagined, and invented, and none have received more attention than John Lennon. Not only was Lennon the band’s enigmatic leader—the deep one, the poetic one, the one with the temper—but he died far too young; murdered at the age of 40 outside his Manhattan apartment by an obsessed fan with a gun.

It was, and remains, a tragedy, and had it not happened, Lennon would be turning 79 years old today, October 9. It also, as these things tend to go, opened the doors to interpretations of the Beatle on screen. Many actors have adopted Lennon’s signature Liverpool lilt, including Christopher Eccelston in 2010’s Lennon Naked, Jared Harris in 2000’s Two of Us, and Ian Hart in 1994’s Backbeat. Just last year Robert Carlyle played him in Yesterday, in an imagined universe where he never died. But my favorite John Lennon interpretation is Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s in Nowhere Boy, a 2009 biopic that is currently streaming on Netflix.

Nowhere Boy was the debut film for director Sam Taylor-Johnson. (She met star Aaron Taylor-Johnson on the set, and the couple has now been married for seven years.) It was liked well enough by critics, but it was a small film that, though it’s been available on streaming for years, continues to fly under the radar. Written by Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool writer Matt Greenhalgh, it’s less a music biopic about “John Lennon the Beatle” and more a coming-of-age story about “John Lennon the boy.” Certainly, some of film depicts early Beatles stories that have become almost folklore to fans at this point—like Lennon playing “Maggie Mae” with The Quarrymen at a festival, where he first met Paul McCartney—but mostly, it focuses on Lennon’s relationship with his mother, Julia, played in the film by Anne-Marie Duff.

John and Julia had a tumultuous relationship. They were separated when John was five, and John was brought up instead by his Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas). After Mimi’s husband died, John and Julia reconnected in his teenage years, until her sudden death by car accident in 1958. As we see in the film, it’s Julia—a passionate, at times, wild woman— who introduces John to music. She teaches him how to play the banjo, dances with him to Screamin’ Jay Hakwins in her living room, and tells him the secret to rock ‘n’ roll: “Sex.”

Nowhere Boy found an emotional heart that rang true with that mother-son relationship, which is something traditional musical biopics often struggle with. Of course, there’s no telling what the real Lennon and his real mother said to each other in private moments—one hopes it was slightly less incestuous than some of the scenes in Nowhere Boy suggest—but Sam Taylor-Johnson provides solid evidence by closing her film with Lennon’s 1970 song, “Mother,” which opens with the lyrics, “Mother, you had me / But I never had you.” (There’s also, as Beatles fans know, his song for her on the White Album, “Julia.”) The trade-off for investing in this relationship is Nowhere Boy taking its sweet time getting to the music of it all. Lennon doesn’t so much as look at an instrument until act two. This frustrated critics at the time, and I get it. After all, half the fun of the genre—which is now even more prevalent than it was ten years ago—is to hear some great songs, is it not?

But as he tried to remind the public in the last years of his life, John Lennon was more than a very good, very famous musician. He was a person, and once upon a time, he was a boy with a complicated relationship with his mother. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who critics also took issue with for his lack of resemblance to the Beatle, is expressive, emotional, and raw. He may not be a Lennon lookalike, but he nails the voice, and even better, he offers fans insight into Lennon’s head that the inscrutable Beatle never offered himself. The musical performances are used sparingly, which makes them feel all the more special. The Beatles cover that closes the film, “In Spite of All the Danger,” is one of the first songs recorded by Lennon, McCartney, and George Harrison. It’s a simple but lovely Buddy Holly-esque tune—in the film sung by Taylor-Johnson, Thomas Brodie Sangster (as Paul), and Sam Bell (as George)—and it’s a gift to hear a well-produced version of the song, as opposed to the tinny original recording you can hear on the Beatles anthology.

If Sam Taylor-Johnson had relentlessly peppered her film with Beatles classics—not unlike Bohemian Rhapsody did for Queen last year—perhaps Nowhere Boy would have been a bigger hit. But what’s the point of that, when you could just as well listen to the albums and skip the film entirely? Instead, Taylor-Johnson delivered a solid coming-of-age story about a troubled young boy who just happened to grow up to be one of the most famous and beloved public figures of all time. If you’re in the mood to honor John Lennon the person, today, I can’t think of a better Beatle film to have in your Netflix queue.

Watch Nowhere Boy on Netflix