A quartet of impressionable performances strengthens the film's insights and lasting power

Rating: 7/10 (21 June 2015)

Love and Mercy is director Bill Pohlad's first film in twenty-five years and he succeeds where more prolific filmmakers have failed. All cinema is about the boundaries of time and the careful selection and omission of events. It's a challenging process given filmmakers feel obliged to be respectful of real life subjects and it's this inclusiveness which thins out the material. This biopic of the Beach Boys singer Brian Wilson resolves the problem of chronology through two contrasting, overlapping portions of his life which become complimentary in theme and psychology. Creative authority and personal control are the film's most reoccurring themes. The dual timelines dramatise Brian as a young man in the 1960s who at the height of his creative powers is an artistic and musical genius but also when he's older, broken and brainwashed by his obsessive therapist. The older sequences outclass many biopics, like Clint Eastwood's Jersey Boys, because rather than blandly laying down a succession of events the screenplay by Michael A. Lerner and Oren Moverman (the director of The Messenger) develops a compelling plot between the relationships of the characters. A quartet of impressionable performances further strengthens the film's insights and lasting power.