Rock and Roll

That’s the setup for writer-director David M. Rosenthal’s “Janie Jones” — “just like the Clash song!”, as one of Ethan’s bandmates says brightly — which may bear a general resemblance to other indie dramas about screwed-up parenting or the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, but is very much its own sharp and funny creation. Maybe it won’t hurt “Janie Jones” too much that it hits less than a year after Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere,” in which Elle Fanning’s deadbeat dad was Stephen Dorff’s soulless movie star, given that nobody went to see that. If the emotional music of Rosenthal’s film seems familiar, as Ethan’s relationship with Janie moves from utter denial to grudging acceptance to a strange dependence, the movie works because it’s essentially an old-fashioned two-hander for a couple of subtle and terrific actors.

At first Ethan claims that he can’t possibly have a kid, and only takes Janie under significant duress from an Arkansas cop, who is otherwise going to summon family services and order a paternity test. At the same time, you see him sizing Janie up, a troubled expression moving across his messed-up, pretty-boy face. (I think Nivola is just too snaky and intelligent-looking to be a movie star, despite his abundant talent; he’s like Bradley Cooper for nihilists.) Looking at her, Ethan sees an alternate existence as a dad, husband and reasonable adult that he completely missed, and is forced to confront the usually rhetorical question of what the point of it all was in highly concrete form.

As for Breslin, she redeems the slightly underwritten role of Janie, who’s already had to grow up too fast and is meeting her supposedly famous father just in time to watch his career hit the rocks. From almost the moment they meet, it’s Janie’s shy, resilient toughness that sustains Ethan, rather than the other way around. Her prickly humor and refusal to be wounded are what convince him, more than anything else, that she must he his daughter. She rescues him from an ass-kicking in a biker bar, joins him on stage after he’s driven his entire band away, and gives him a hard time about flirting with “the cougars of the Plains states.” (Ethan, offended: “They weren’t cougars!” Janie: “Oh, yes they were!”) Janie also proves to be an asset, in the most literal way possible, during Ethan’s tense reunion with his estranged mother, a Chicago society woman named Lily (another terrific cameo, this one from Frances Fisher).

Nivola and Breslin perform their own songs creditably, both separately and together, and “Janie Jones” depicts the actual tedium of a grade-B rock tour as no movie has since Bruce McDonald’s justly legendary “Hard Core Logo.” Coming up with the right balance of redemption and realism to conclude this improbable father-daughter fable was always going to be tough, and Rosenthal’s ending feels a bit too contrived for these immensely convincing, human, damaged characters. That aside, “Janie Jones” is a compelling and unpretentious indie built around two wonderfully layered performances and straightforward storytelling. Give it a listen.

“Janie Jones” is now playing in New York and Seattle, and opens Nov. 4 in Los Angeles, with other cities to follow. It’s also available on-demand from many cable and satellite providers.

Here’s what I wrote about “Nowhere Boy” last January after attending the film’s Sundance premiere, with the celebrated couple in attendance. (I’ve made some edits for clarity and context.)

There is no more mythologized figure in the history of pop culture than John Lennon, unless it’s Lennon’s teenage idol, Elvis Presley. So I wasn’t even sure I wanted to bother with Sam Taylor-Wood’s “Nowhere Boy,” a retelling of Lennon’s late teen years in Liverpool, just before the creation of the Beatles. I’m glad I did. Aaron Johnson’s hulking, almost loutish performance as the angry young Liverpudlian may displease some Lennon-worshipers, but the movie is an elegantly rendered surprise. This is a classic British family melodrama, anchored by one of the subtlest, richest roles in Kristin Scott Thomas’ impressive career.

Johnson plays the 17-year-old Lennon as a boiling pit of anger and yearning. He’s almost desperate for approval and affection (and convinced of his own genius) but covers that most of the time with a mask of sardonic, often cutting humor. “Why didn’t God make me Elvis?” he jokes to his party-girl mother, Julia (a lovely, vulnerable performance from Anne-Marie Duff). “I’ll get the bastard back for that.”

Julia’s answer — “He was saving you for John Lennon!” — reads on the page too much like movie dialogue, but Duff pulls it off. Matt Greenhalgh’s adept and concise screenplay, based on a memoir by Lennon’s half-sister, Julia Baird, generally avoids such pseudo-prophetic moments. (Greenhalgh also wrote “Control,” Anton Corbijn’s film about a doomed rock icon from a different era, Joy Division singer Ian Curtis.)

If this Lennon seems like an arrogant little shit, sometimes irresistible but often insufferable, Johnson and the filmmakers have based that characterization largely on Lennon’s own reflections, particularly in post-Beatles interviews. More broadly, this Lennon is an almost archetypal angry young man or rebel schoolboy of British Isles fiction and drama, a Liverpool cousin of Stephen Dedalus or the kids in Lindsay Anderson’s films, dreaming of escape from his strangled, provincial environment.

But as I mentioned earlier, “Nowhere Boy” isn’t just about aspiring rock god John Lennon, and how he meets a couple of guitar-playing schoolmates named Paul (Thomas Sangster) and George (Sam Bell) and starts a skiffle band called the Quarrymen. Those things happen in the film, and Sangster is wonderful in limited screen time, playing 15-year-old McCartney as an angel-faced, serious-minded prodigy. “You don’t seem much like a rock ‘n’ roll guy,” John taunts him. “Why?” asks Paul. “Because I don’t run around smashing things up and acting like a dick?”

That stuff is essentially context for the film’s central drama, the three-way, push-pull relationship between John, his damaged and flighty mother, and his redoubtable Aunt Mimi (Scott Thomas), who raised John after both his parents abandoned him at age 5. Mimi is a fortress of middle-class English propriety against the heavily Irish, heavily working-class landscape of Liverpool. She refuses to grieve after her beloved husband dies (“It’s just the two of us now, so let’s get on with it,” she tells John), runs a rigorous household of proper teatimes and dinnertimes and is of course predictably suspicious of John’s rock ‘n’ roll dreams. You watch Scott Thomas as Aunt Mimi and as the deranged French housewife in the recent “Leaving,” and she barely seems like the same person; I’m not sure there’s another living actress with this breadth and range.

“Nowhere Boy” is less concerned with a boy’s first steps toward stardom than with his first steps toward emotional maturity, and those lessons are all provided by Mimi, not by John’s irresistible, unstable and profoundly unreliable mother. Julia takes him on day trips to Blackpool, dances with him to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins records, showers him with borderline-inappropriate affection and then disappears, both emotionally and actually. Mimi, on the other hand, put in the hard work of preparing a brilliant but deeply wounded child for the heavy lifting of manhood — and the film makes a strong case that without her influence John Lennon would never have become John Lennon. Scott Thomas’ delicate, ferocious performance captures a woman quietly at war with herself, who begins to realize that her vision of respectability may not fit the remarkable young man in her care.

A packed house of Sundance civilians and celebrities, including Elton John, gave “Nowhere Boy” an extended ovation, and then sat reverently while Taylor-Wood delivered droll anecdotes about her phone conversations with Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono, who both, slowly and incrementally, gave the film their blessing. “I’d be shopping in the supermarket and, oh my God, it’s Paul — Sir Paul! — on the phone,” she told us. “He’d just give me some little tidbit, something he remembered about John or about Mimi, and then he’d hang up.”

“Nowhere Boy” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.