Though the legend of Brian Wilson has been revived in the popular consciousness following the release of Smile in 2004 and The Smile Sessions in 2011, it probably helps to have a broader familiarity with the story to get the most out of the new Brian Wilson biopic Love and Mercy.

The Beach Boys are generally not thought of as a band with complex musical ambitions, but for a brief period in the mid to late 60s they became an experimental pop group under the leadership of Brian Wilson. In 1964 Wilson retired from live performance to concentrate exclusively on recording their new album, Pet Sounds. Bigger budgets and better recording technology in the 1960s created new opportunities for musicians to use the studio as an instrument, which began a split in popular music between musicians as performers and musicians as composers. Having been freed from the performance side, Wilson began experimenting with studio techniques and increasingly intricate arrangements. He essentially ditched the rest of the band, hiring the best session musicians in an attempt to compete with his idol Phil Spector and The Beach Boys’ chart rivals, The Beatles.

Disappointing sales of Pet Sounds and Brian’s increasing disconnection from the band led them to pull the plug on his even more ambitious follow-up Smile. Mike Love, Brian’s cousin and cheerleader for the “old stuff”, took over leadership of the band and returned them to their surf pop roots.

Love and Mercy starts by breezing through The Beach Boys’ early career in the opening credits, jumping straight into the recording of Pet Sounds. If you’re on Mike Love’s side musically, then this is the start of Brian Wilson’s decent into madness. The 60s version of Brian Wilson is played by Paul Dano, who until recently has been cast in a string of psycho bad guy roles (e.g. 12 Years a Slave, Prisoners, and Looper), so initially it seems like the filmmakers are agreeing with Love’s opinion. Dano’s baby-faced features are not only a good likeness for Wilson but also help to illustrate the long term emotional scars left on Wilson by his controlling and violent father, who was an early proponent of the Joe Jackson “beat your kids until they make you money” school of band management.

It’s the focus on the musical process that really sets this film apart though. Too many biopics of musicians assume they’re preaching to the converted, so their treatment of music is to just play a few hits on the soundtrack and they’re done. Love and Mercy actually makes the recording process into a central point of drama, where the conflict between churning out pop product and trying something new is personified and played out on screen. Wilson’s breakdown post-Smile isn’t blamed solely on his increasing drug intake (though it helped…), but on his inability to reconcile what he was trying to achieve with the reception it got from both his family and the public.

Wilson’s fragile mental and physical state in the 70s led him to showbiz psychotherapist Dr. Eugene Landy, who essentially replaced Wilson’s drug habit with a cornucopia of legal drugs. This is the later version of Brian Wilson we see played by John Cusack: over-medicated, and completely under the thumb of Dr. Landy (Paul Giamatti). Cusack looks nothing like Wilson – which is a bit jarring when intercut with Dano’s scenes – but his quiet performance is effective in showing how Wilson was forcibly regressed back to his childhood, with Landy standing in for Wilson’s abusive father.

The most standard part of the film is the love-saving-the-mad-genius trope, which comes in the form of Wilson’s second wife Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks). At first it’s a bit of a struggle to see what Ledbetter saw in Wilson, but Giamatti’s unrelentingly evil depiction of Landy soon makes it clear why she’d be on a rescue mission. It’s also good seeing Banks in a purely dramatic role for once.



Apart from both lip-synched and re-voiced versions of Beach Boys’ songs, special mention has to go to Atticus Ross’s score. Ross (Trent Reznor’s collaborator of choice) exclusively used outtakes from the original Smile sessions to compose the score as a sound collage, which gets pretty crazy during Wilson’s darker episodes.



While the 60s section is definitely the strongest part of the film, the later section probably holds the most surprises for those less familiar with Wilson’s story after disappearing from The Beach Boys. For musicians, it’s all about the tragedy of a man driving himself nuts because no one had invented the sampler yet. Highly recommended for anyone vaguely interested in music history.

- Adam Raboczi