‘Nowhere Boy’
Last week I celebrated John Lennon’s birthday by rewatching Nowhere Boy on Netflix. This 2009 film from director Sam Taylor-Wood is more of a coming-of-age story for Lennon than it is a music biopic, and perhaps that’s why it’s my favorite Beatles film. (It also helps that star Aaron Taylor-Johnson is very hot in it.) This is not the movie of John Lennon the Beatle, it’s the movie of John Lennon the teen and centers on the musician’s short-lived, complicated relationship with his mother, who died by car accident in 1958. Beatles fans will still get their fix of Fab Four folklore—like the scene where Paul McCartney auditions for Lennon’s band The Quarrymen by playing Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock”—but they’ll also get a heartfelt story about a boy unknowingly living out trauma that Lennon fans know will haunt him for the rest of his life.