Nowhere Boy

Nowhere Boy (2009) is a British biographical drama you can watch online on iFILM. It's the feature debut of director Sam Taylor-Johnson, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the title role.

This isn't a Beatles film. It's about the teenager in working-class Liverpool of the mid-fifties who hadn't become one yet. John is raised by his strict Aunt Mimi and barely knows his real mother until a funeral throws them together. There he spots Julia, bright and reckless and nothing like Mimi, and the film settles into the space between two women who each claim him as theirs. Julia is the one who puts a banjo in his hands, spins records for him, hands him rock and roll. Out of those household quarrels and first chords comes a band called The Quarrymen, the one that would later grow into something far bigger.

Shot in England, the film leans on Anne-Marie Duff as Julia and Kristin Scott Thomas as Mimi, and their scenes carry its raw nerve. One odd footnote: the actor playing John and the director later married. This is the quiet, personal kind of music movie, less about the stage than about where a song comes from. Stream Nowhere Boy (2009) online on iFILM.