Brian Wilson, the co-founder and creative force behind California rock band the Beach Boys, seemed to have a habit of finding himself surrounded by negative influences. Bill Pohlad’s Love & Mercy takes a look at the man behind such classic songs as Good Vibrations and God Only Knows across two periods of his life in which he was struggling with much-publicised mental problems and under the cosh from criticism both internal and external.
Paul Dano plays the younger incarnation of Wilson toiling away in the recording studio, striving for perfection with Pet Sounds, the album that would in many ways define the Beach Boys and represent a high point in Wilson’s career creatively. Suffering from panic attacks and beginning to suffer auditory hallucinations, Wilson has been shying away from his touring duties to concentrate on perfecting his new record. When it is met a mixture of confusion and apathy from his band and outright hostility by singer Mike Love (Jake Abel), Wilson’s fragile mental state begins to crumble further as he struggles to record the even more adventurous follow-up album Smile.
John Cusack plays an older, 1980’s version of Wilson in a narrative that runs concurrently with Dano’s. Living under the constant care of Dr Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), Wilson is a shell of his former self and effectively living under Landy’s rule on a cocktail of prescription drugs. Former model and car salesman Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) meets him as he peruses the Cadillacs and, after striking up a relationship with him, becomes determined to rescue from his physical and psychological prison.
Pohlad’s narrative jumps back and forth between the sixties and eighties splicing the two narratives together: mingling and contrasting a younger Wilson at the peak of his powers, yet on the slide psychologically, with an older man emerging from a mental fog. Dano’s performance as an eager, yet emotionally hamstrung musician is fantastically lively. The sequences in which Pohlad recreates the Pet Sounds recording sessions are a real treat, romping along as they do to the tune of many of Wilson’s most famous compositions. Cusack as the older man gives an equally earnest performance as the elder Wilson, undermined slightly by the odd decision to make Dano, but not him, look visually similar to the film’s subject.
An energetic rock biopic, punctuated with moments of teeth-grinding psychosomatic toil and abuse, Love & Mercy always seems like it should run the risk of feeling uneven in tone and become lacklustre. It’s down to a combination of the full-blooded performances and the weirdness and genius of its subject matter, that the film remains constantly, totally engrossing.
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