This film was released 26th December 2010, and is no longer screening.

Before Mark Chapman, before Yoko, before The Beatles, there was a John Lennon we hardly know: the Liverpool teenager (believably played by newcomer Aaron Johnston) who went to school and lived with his Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott-Thomas). This absorbing biopic suggests that the domestic upheavals of his adolescent years had a prime influence on the formative musician, easy to believe when we see him discovering his mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff) living just across the park with a common law partner and a whole other family. Complicating the situation, free-spirited, rock ‘n’ roll fan Julia is everything the buttoned-down Mimi is not, prompting major friction between these two sisters, and exacerbating Lennon’s anguish over the uncertainties of his parentage.

In her first feature film, high-profile British artist Sam Taylor-Wood proceeds with a stylistic restraint which will surprise many, yet her instincts that this is above all an emotive character drama are spot-on.