Superb Brian Wilon bio-pic hits all the right notes

Rating: 9/10 (21 June 2015)

"Love & Mercy" (2014 release; 121 min.) is a bio-pic about the life of Brian Wilson, the legendary Beach Boys singer-songwriter. As the movie opens, we get a clever montage of old footage (painstakingly recreated) of the Beach Boys' early successes. After the opening credits, we skip to the 1980s where an older Brian Wilson (played by John Cusack) meets Melinda Ledbetter (played by Elizabeth Banks) at a Cadillac dealership. She has no idea who he is. We then skip back to the 1960s, where we see the younger Brian (played by Paul Dano), after a panic attack and no longer touring, and blown away by the recent Beatles album "Revolver", hatch what would eventually become the "Pet Sounds" album. At this point we are maybe 15 min. into the movie, but to tell you more would spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.
Couple of comments: any bio-pic of a music legend is going to be a highly subjective interpretation (check the Bob Dylan bio-pic "I'm Not There" of a few years ago). In this case, director Bill Pohlad focuses on 2 specific periods of Wilson's life: the mid-60s as Wilson's mind slowly but surely gave in to "the voices", and the mid/late-80s, when Wilson was under the legal guardianship of Dr. Eugene Landy (played by Paul Giamatti). Of course I cannot vouch whether things really happened as they are portrayed in the movie, but the movie certainly does feel quite authentic. I had seen the trailer a number of times beforehand, and was worried that the performance of John Cusack, who looks nothing like the real-life Brian Wilson, simply wouldn't work, in particular since Paul Dano as the younger Brian Wilson is so unbelievably on point. I needn't have worried, as Cusack makes you believe. But the best performance in the movie may well be by Elizabeth Banks, whom we most recently say in "Pitch Perfect 2", both acting and directing. Here, she plays the loving girlfriend who decides that Landy needs to be stopped. Giamatti has a choice performance as Landy, about as unlikeable a character as you'll ever meet, but perhaps even worse is Wilson's dad Murray (played by Bill Camp), abusing/hitting Brian so badly and so often that Brian is 96% deaf on his right ear. There are quite a few tough and uncomfortable scenes in the movie that only reinforce the feeling that Pohlad didn't just want to do a "love letter" movie about Brian Wilson. The key moment for me was when Wilson is playing a piano riff to Mile Love over and over and over again, as he tells Wilson "I have this song stuck in my head, but I can't get it out", and it's becoming clearer and clearer that Wilson has become a prisoner of his own mind, and worse. (That piano riff would eventually become "Good Vibrations, though.) Bottom line: this is an outstanding bio-pic, and any music history buff will want to see this.
"Love & Mercy" opened last weekend at my local art-house theater here in Cincinnati, and I finally had a chance to see it this weekend. The early evening screening where I saw this at was attended okay, but just okay. I had been looking forward to this movie, and even though I had high expectations coming into this, they were met, and then some. One of the better music bio-pics I have seen in a long time. If you have a chance to check it out, be it in the theater, or eventually on VOC or DVD/Blu-ray, by all means do so. "Love & Mercy" is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!