B

This biopic about restless teen John Lennon will probably be referred to as “A Portrait of the Beatle as a Young Man,” but as directed by Sam Taylor-Wood “Nowhere Boy” exhibits little of the personal style you’d expect of an artist turned filmmaker, let alone the risk-taking inclinations of James Joyce. It’s a surprisingly conventional treatment of a kid with family problems who just happens to have a future ahead of him as a music icon and eventual martyr.

That doesn’t mean that it isn’t well-made and compelling, in an old-fashioned Douglas Sirkish way. In Sirk’s movies, of course, the suffering was usually endured by a woman; here it’s a boy. So perhaps the better comparison would be to James Dean’s two early films, “Rebel Without a Cause” and “East of Eden,” both similarly flamboyant studies of teen angst that, together with a tragic death, brought him artistic immortality of the sort Lennon’s much longer career and murder would endow him with. But Sirk’s overripe soap operas and Dean’s hyper-emotional pictures with Ray and Kazan all share a common element—they remain hugely enjoyable, even if they’ve dated somewhat. “Nowhere Boy” isn’t up to their standard, but it’s an enjoyable facsimile.

Aaron Johnson, who was the wannabe street hero of “Kick-Ass,” is solid if not overwhelming as young Lennon, a rambunctious schoolboy who lives with his stern Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas) and likable Uncle George (David Threlfall) until George suddenly drops dead one night. It’s not long after that John and his pal Pete (Josh Bolt) discover American rock ’n roll and become fans of Elvis and his less famous contemporaries. Lennon’s fascination with the music is stoked by his emotionally freewheeling birth mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), who had given him to Mimi when he was five and has been living with her boyfriend Bobby (David Morrissey) and their two daughters only streets away, never having made contact with him.

The rest of the film follows two plot threads. One has to do with the pull-and-tug conflict that develops between Mimi and Julia over the boy both have mothered, though in rather different ways, and his internal conflict over which of them he should now stay with. In the process of resolving this matter—not without many tears and much tragedy—the secret of Julia’s past and the truth about the decision to turn John over to Mimi’s care are revealed.

That domestic melodrama is conjoined with Lennon’s decision to become a rocker himself. The picture depicts his first attempt to form an ad hoc band, the Quarrymen, from school chums—which leads in turn to a meeting with a talented fifteen-year old named Paul McCartney (Thomas Brodie Sanger). The chemistry between the two—though they sometimes have rough patches—helps the group achieve some local success before a sudden death brings the boys even closer as a result of a common experience of loss. The rest, as they say, is musical history, left to the viewer’s memory and imagination.

As a tale of a young man working through emotional trauma to the cusp of an incredible career, “Nowhere Boy” is effective enough, though much of its power comes from our outside knowledge of Lennon’s later astronomical pop success. There’s a strong element of hagiography at work, of course, but the attention to period detail in Alice Normington’s production design, Charmian Adams’s art direction, Barbara Herman-Skelding’s set decoration and Julian Day’s costumes helps make it easy to watch, especially as the film is lovingly shot in glowing widescreen images by cinematographer Seamus McGarvey. (Some of the individual compositions could stand alone as museum-worthy photographs.)

And for the most part the cast do what’s asked of them quite well. Johnson makes a dynamic and sympathetic Lennon, even if he lacks the full degree of charisma the role demands, and though Sangster doesn’t resemble McCartney all that closely, he makes a fine foil to him. Scott Thomas certainly embodies the prim and proper Mimi to a T. Duff, on the other hand, is more erratic as Julia, though the character is herself that way.

Perhaps the occasional unsteadiness in the performances is due to Taylor-Wood, who on the evidence of this film has a painterly eye but seems less secure in dealing with actors. But notwithstanding her freshman stumbles, “Nowhere Man” works as a conventionally satisfying docu-drama about the difficult teen years of a musical legend. If only it could have been as unconventional as Lennon was.

B

When a film you might not have much hope for turns out better than you expected, it’s always a pleasant surprise—even when it’s a picture like this remake of George Romero’s 1973 shlockfest about a small town reduced to murderous madness by toxins in the water supply and the military’s attempt to wipe out the deranged population, which is obviously not designed to be a “pleasant” viewing experience. This new version of “The Crazies,” cannily directed by Breck Eisner, may not break new ground, but like Zack Snyder’s 2004 reworking of Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” it treads familiar territory with considerable dexterity.

The original picture was, of course, an extremely low-budget, seat-of-the-pants follow-up to Romero’s breakthrough “Night of the Living Dead,” and frankly it doesn’t hold up all that well. Eisner’s is certainly slicker and better appointed, marked by a solid production design by Art Menzies, spiffy art direction from Greg Berry, and crisply atmospheric cinematography by Maxime Alexandre—as well as a flavorful score by Mark Isham.

What makes “The Crazies” work, however, are Eisner’s skilled handling and the efforts of a cast that’s stronger than one usually finds in such fare. Timothy Olyphant and Joe Anderson star as Sheriff David Dutton of Ogden Marsh, Iowa, and Deputy Russell Clark, who discover a plane wreck in a nearby lake—the source of the deadly pollution—after Dutton has been forced to shoot a local who threatened a couple of high school baseball teams with a rifle. After other people in the community go off on murderous rampages of their own, the military quarantines the whole town, including Dutton and his pregnant wife Judy (Radha Mitchell).

The central question is whether the authorities are interested in diagnosing the cause of the outbreak and treating the locals, or simply in exterminating them and sweeping the whole business under the Midwestern grass. So anti-government paranoia lies at the root of the plot. But most of the action is devoted to the usual sort of chases, hair’s-breadth escapes, and—most notably—bloodletting and evisceration. The film necessarily plays into the new era’s taste for gore and guts, as well as explicit makeup in the case of people in the later stages of the infection. But in general Eisner doesn’t go as far in that direction as many of his predecessors have done, and the picture isn’t as repulsive as most, preferring cleverness over mere grossness. It does, however, begin to run out of gas in the final stretch.

Olyphant, a good actor, also gives it a touch of class, doing a solid job even if neither the sheriff nor his wife (also well played by Mitchell) is terribly well developed as a character. Anderson has a showier role as the lawman who’s none too self-controlled even before the plague strikes, and everyone else does at least a professional job.

“The Crazies” isn’t the best title in the world, but you can blame Romero for that. And this movie isn’t the finest horror picture in the world, either. But it’s sufficiently well done to allow one to say that you’re not nuts to go see it.

And how can you not like a movie about a government even more berserk than its infected citizens and the madness of the military mind that manages not one but two musical references to “Dr. Strangelove” in the first half hour?