Rob Blackhurst

And so for the first film experience of the New Year I trudged through the arctic waste to the Barbican centre - passed those strange hothouses full of South American greenery – to a half-empty but incredibly comfortable cinema to see "Nowhere Boy".

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I didn't have particularly high expectations. My love for the Beatles is undimmed but over the last fifteen years the annual product release-in-time-for-Christmas from Apple (Anthology, 1, Let it Be Naked, Yellow Submarine, Love, Rock Band) has jaded even my appetite. When I pick up a sunday colour supplement running a Help! Special or see another Paul Gambuccini bank holiday programme on the cultural significance of the Fab Four I get that sinking feeling – the accrued layers of forty years of worship are starting to feel pompous and oppressive. Which is exactly the opposite of the spirit of their greatest records.

Rock biopics are a pretty threadbare medium at their best - I saw "Ray" and "Walk the Line" in the same week and they are now terminally muddled in my head since they seemed to have exactly the same story line. Poor Southern roots, fame, addiction, redemption, death. To allow a double-barrelled avant-garde artist ("French for bullshit" as Lennon once said) to make her directorial debut with a film about John's teenage years seemed to invite a car crash.

As it was, Nowhere Boy turned out to be a bracing winter blast in a room of stale air right from opening second – with that thunderous opening chord from "Hard Day's Night". Like "Backbeat", the only other successful Beatles biopic, it concentrates on relationships and, crucially, doesn't overdo those knowing winks to future success beloved of the medium.

The love triangle between straitlaced spinster Aunt Mimi and his seductive bolter of a biological mother, Julia, is done with complexity. If Macca did have a word with Taylor-Wood to warn her not to turn Mimi into an ogre, then his words have been heeded. Christian Scott-Thomas does a wonderful line in Mimi's post-war brittleness, but also in a dry Northern sarcasm that she seems to have passed directly to her charge.

Aaron Johnson is great, probably better looking than Lennon, but captures all that frustrated energy and creativity as he lollops around Liverpool, encountering gangs, blow-jobs, and minor sevenths – treating all of life as a great game put on for his own amusement.

Unexpectedly, the musical bits are really well done. Johnson does a lovely acoustic take on Lennon's first song "Hello Little Girl" – convincingly mimicking that sandpapery voice - and making a discarded piece of juvenelia sound like a single from by the" Last Shadow Puppets". The other Beatles original in the flim " In Spite of All Danger" (actually the only McCartney/Harrison song in existence) sounds much more warm and bluesy than the crackling Quarrymen demo. "Twenty Flight Rock" provides the backdrop to a great scene when the worldly Quarrymen first meet an incredibly boyish Paul who astounds them with his technical proficiency.

The only distraction for this viewer was that McCartney is played by that winsome kid from "Love, Actually" and has a newly-hatched looked about him. But otherwise, Nowhere Boy is utterly beguiling.

Normally the fifties is presented on screen in dingy browns and grays so that, as in Vera Drake, you can almost taste the boiled cabbage and smell the linoleum. Here, with Teddy boys, guitar shops, apple green buses, docks full of newly shipped vinyl, and airy parks, post-war Liverpool feels bursting with possibility. Which, of course, it was.