Interesting to watch this US TV movie on the early life of John Lennon and compare it with Sam Taylor-Wood's recent, acclaimed "Nowhere Boy" which covers almost the same time-frame in the nascent Beatle's life. The latter is a more imaginative, if less judgemental work, but as a big Lennon fan myself, while accepting the inevitable duplication in both, I enjoyed this bio-pic too.
For one thing, the actors playing their famous counterparts did quite resemble them physically, while their acting too was largely competent. Blair Brown is probably the best known actor in the cast, as John's fusty, smothering but ultimately loving Aunt Mimi, who raises him as a child to manhood, to help her hapless but adored sister Julia, the boy's mother.
I'm fairly well versed, like most Beatlemaniacs I'm sure, in the chronology of events portrayed, including the early death of his mother, his key meetings with Stu Sutcliffe, Paul McCartney and future-wife Cynthia Powell as well as the fledgling group's struggles to get to the "toppermost of the poppermost" from it would appear the bottom of the bottomest. I didn't identify too many inconsistencies in the narrative from memory, and appreciated the depiction of the young Lennon as a temperamental, confused teenager, certainly no angel in his attitudes to women, gays and even those closest to him.
There were one or two over-obvious premonitions of future events, the group crossing Abbey Road, for example, or when John and a school-friend stumble on the gravestone of one long-deceased Eleanor Rigby (wasn't that a Paul song?) and later again, almost half-expected him to say, when sitting in the grounds of the local children's home that he wished he could stay in Strawberry Foelds, forever, but with un-flashy TV-movie direction, (although there was a lazy highlights recap at the end) convincing rendering of late 50's / early 60's Liverpool, good acting and fine musical reproduction of the group's early hits, I'd definitely award this film two out of three "yeahs".
