Backbeat.  The Hours and Times.  I Wanna Hold Your Hand.  Fictionalized accounts of The Beatles constitute, by now, a genre of their own, and range in quality from the barely watchable to the dreadful (and while not a strict account per se, I utterly loathed Across The Universe).  Joining those films in October is Nowhere Boy, a chronicle of the early days of John Lennon.

While the below trailer for the bio-pic looks, well, like a trailer for a bio-pic, the film stars the reliably amazing Kristin Scott Thomas as Lennon’s Aunt Mimi (a rare, ‘81 clip of the real Mimi Smith follows at the bottom).

I’m also somewhat intrigued by Nowhere Boy‘s director, Sam Taylor-Wood.  She’s the British artist with a thing for decaying still-lives.  If you’ve never seen her A Little Death video, an ode to “the transience of biological life” featuring a rapidly decaying cobra rabbit, check it out here. 

After overcoming two bouts with cancer—breast and colon—Taylor-Wood is now in a relationship with Nowhere Boy‘s Lennon, actor Aaron Johnson, who’s 23 years her junior.  The couple are expecting the birth of their first child somewhere around the time Nowhere Boy opens in the U.S.

Unfortunately it’s a bloody boring film.  If it wasn’t about somebody who later became famous it never would have been made. 

I am looking forward to ‘Lennon Naked’ with Christopher Eccleston later this year though.