Nowadays, most of us enjoy what academics like to call "parasocial" lives, in which we feast on the doings of our celebrity heroes even more voraciously than we attend to the ups and downs, triumphs and embarrassments of our actual families and friends. Hence, perhaps, the current appetite for biography of all kinds.
The slender narratives of Wags and sportspersons elbow Booker shortlisters out of the bestseller charts. It's not just the red-tops that trade on the private behaviour of the famous; posh Sundays fill their pages with the sexual exploits of long-dead literary giants. Cinema, however, can go where print can't. Its reimagined, improved and tastefully dramatised equivalents of the medieval lives of the saints leave Hello magazine standing.
Sometimes, however, we like to crack up our interest in the behaviour of the great to be more than mere greed for gossip. It's pleasing to imagine that our urge to lay bare the secrets of our betters springs from something other than prurience. Genius is a vital part of the mystery of what it means to be human. Surely it's our duty to try and understand it. A life's work must somehow be entwined with life experience. Thus, we can reassure ourselves that while lapping up sensation and scurrility we're engaged in a worthy task.
If people treat Nowhere Boy in this way, we can't blame its director. Sam Taylor-Wood offers us her portrayal of John Lennon's teenage years without much hint as to its possible implications for his oeuvre. Indeed, she amuses herself by carefully excluding from the film any mention of the word "Beatles". Nonetheless, hers isn't an account of the formative years of some fictional or anonymous adolescent. She chose as her subject one of the most intriguing and original artists of our age. So I thought I might as well ask her: did she think there was any connection between the events she's delineated and her hero's subsequent output?
She didn't treat the question as irrelevant or uninteresting. The desire to answer it, she said, was at least part of the reason why she'd wanted to make the picture. She'd wondered what could have created as iconic a figure as Lennon. To get some kind of idea, she'd compared his turbulent youth with the ferment of her own early life. She'd concluded that people who experience trauma in their formative years may seek peace and safety in the world of the imagination.
This may well be true, but it doesn't go far towards explaining the genesis of Sgt Pepper or The White Album. Cinemagoers may of course spot insights in Ms Taylor-Wood's film that she didn't pick up on herself. Maybe Lennon's fraught relationship with Mimi shaped the opacity of his imagery: the film ends with the announcement that in spite of his aunt's stern attitude towards him he continued to phone her every week of his life. Perhaps maternal desertion inspired a thirst for affection that fuelled the yearning in his lyrics. Oedipal tendencies could have influenced his tangled view of relationships. Stroppiness engendered by youthful discontent may have driven him to reject conventional musical norms.
Or, on the other hand, perhaps not. Nowhere Boy may be riveting, but its contribution to the exegesis of its hero's musical legacy seems limited at best. Ms Taylor-Wood says she doesn't want her film to be viewed as a biopic: this is one reason why she doesn't dwell on Lennon's handover to his aunt at the age of five, even though it's this experience that underpins the drama she chooses to fashion. Nonetheless, few full-blown biopics are any more illuminating about their subjects' creative achievements. The big screen, it seems, can indulge our adulation of our gods and goddesses; the enigma of their genius remains beyond its reach.
