Aaron Johnson stars as John Lennon in Sam-Taylor Wood's biopic Nowhere Boy. (Liam Daniel/Maple Pictures)

In the stellar biopic Nowhere Boy, director Sam Taylor-Wood depicts the influences that shaped John Lennon in the late 1950s – years before his unprecedented fame, the bed-ins with Yoko, the decision to give peace a chance.

It's a fascinating look at the adolescence of a musical genius, propelled by Aaron Johnson’s wonderful performance as the teenaged Lennon, a kid who was full of contradictions – emotionally vulnerable yet cruel at times, cocky yet capable of great sensitivity.

'This film could only have been directed by a woman. So much of Lennon’s life was shaped by women, I couldn’t imagine this being directed by a man.'

— Aaron Johnson, who plays John Lennon in Nowhere Boy

Growing up in postwar Liverpool, Lennon embraced the first wave of rock 'n' roll with religious fervour – Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Little Richard were deities to him, and each one had a profound impact on his career. But there were other forces affecting Lennon, most notably an ongoing tug of war between his refined Aunt Mimi – who essentially raised him from the age of five – and his mother, Julia, a troubled and rebellious soul who died in a car accident when Lennon was 17.

"I kind of looked at it as, behind every great man, there are two incredibly complex women," Taylor-Wood explained in a recent interview at a Toronto hotel. "It's just that curiosity of what made Lennon who he was. I definitely think these two women really kind of built him. On one end of it, there was his mother, this vivacious, rock 'n' roll-loving, free-spirited woman. And then there was Aunt Mimi, who taught him about Oscar Wilde and painting and poetry, but in a much more emotionally restrained environment. It's an interesting dynamic."

Nowhere Boy is set between 1955 and 1960, and revolves around the reappearance of Julia (played by Anne-Marie Duff) in Lennon's life. The teenager is besotted with his mother – indeed, some of their flirtatious interactions seem almost Oedipal. They connect musically – Julia purchases a guitar for her son and teaches him some rudimentary chords. Aunt Mimi (played to scowling, buttoned-down perfection by Kristin Scott Thomas) disapproves, utterly unconvinced of rock 'n' roll’s musical validity and aware of her sister’s capacity for disappearing at a moment’s notice. John’s attendance at school spirals downward as he spends time with his mother and starts his first group, the Quarrymen.

Best known as a photographer and conceptual artist in the U.K., Taylor-Wood was looking to try her hand at feature films when Joe Wright (Atonement, Pride and Prejudice) handed her Matt Greenhalgh’s script for Nowhere Boy. "Joe had been looking for a script to direct and he generously handed this one over to me. I just felt that it was such a powerful story in itself, never mind the fact that it was John Lennon. And I entered into it thinking I was making a coming-of-age film, rather than a film that celebrates Lennon. It's incredible to think that I walked in as naively as I did."

Nowhere Boy may be her full-length debut, but Taylor-Wood displays a subtle touch. She avoids cheap foreshadowing and presents the fateful first encounter between Lennon and the baby-faced Paul McCartney (Thomas Sangster) at a church fair as offhandedly and unglamorously as possible.

“Of course, for everyone now it’s a significant moment in rock 'n' roll history, it’s one of the most seminal meetings. But I had to remember this was just two guys, two teenagers meeting for the first time. For them, it wouldn’t have had that weight and significance. So in a way what I wanted to show was just how inane and straightforward a meeting it was. I wanted it to just be there and almost to make light of it.”

Shot on location in Liverpool, Taylor-Wood’s film illustrates the profound impact the port city had on the nascent musician. It’s hard to believe in the iTunes age, but in 1950s England it was a challenge to get your hands on an actual piece of rock 'n' roll vinyl. The film shows Lennon heading down to the docks, bartering with sailors for treasured U.S. 45s.

“It’d be a rush down to the docks and the boat that came in from New York to Liverpool was the main point of access,” Johnson, the film’s star, said in a separate interview. “There’d be the new Elvis record that no one else in England has got. That was the excitement, that was the shit going down there, man.”

John Lennon (Aaron Johnson, left) has a close but fraught relationship with his mother, Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), in Sam-Taylor Wood's biopic Nowhere Boy. (Liam Daniel/Maple Pictures)

Only 20 years old, Johnson has no living memory of Lennon. He saw that as an advantage in shaping the character. “Because I’m not a fanatic, I could be an onlooker. I could look inside the box and observe and analyze it. I read tons of biographies, I watched old footage of him, I looked at photos and tried to copy the way he looked in those. I had to start learning guitar. I just got into his head and his inspirations became my inspirations. He was a visionary and a dreamer and a poet. And he was funny.”

Johnson and Taylor-Wood are now a couple, a fact that caused a minor scandal in the British tabloid press last year, primarily due to the director’s age (43). They had a child in July.

“To be honest, this film could only have been directed by a woman,” says Johnson. “So much of Lennon’s life was shaped by women, I couldn’t imagine this being directed by a man. You have to go so in depth and intense and deal with those emotions. Sam could understand that and really break it down.”

The end result is an accomplished study of a Beatle-in-waiting, but Taylor-Wood had profound doubts about her ability to complete the project. Then fate intervened.

“I was feeling a lot of pressure from many different angles,” she remembers. “From relatives of Lennon, family, friends. I was also feeling pressure from producers and budgetary constraints. And I just thought, 'Do I really want to do this?' I literally got into the car and I thought I was going to call the producers and say, ‘Let’s meet about this because I don’t know if I can do this.’ And I put the keys in the ignition and Lennon’s voice came straight out at me singing Starting Over on the radio. I just sat there for a moment, as if talking to him, and I said, ‘OK, I’ll do it! I’ll do it!’”

Nowhere Boy opens in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto on Oct. 15.

Greig Dymond writes about the arts for CBC News.