Brian Wilson, the creative force behind 60s pop-music phenomenon the Beach Boys — apparently the only musicians the Beatles were afraid of, as competition — has died. I’ve seen Wilson compared in the last day to Mozart, and I’m not sure that’s wrong. Wilson changed rock ’n’ roll in immeasurable ways that still resonate today. He invented “the album” as an art form with 1966’s Pet Sounds. He made pop music like it was symphonic. His status as an icon has long since been cemented.
But while he was crafting musical beauty, Wilson was also coping with a mental illness wrongly diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. The unconventional 2015 biopic Love & Mercy is an intense portrait — starring Paul Dano in an astonishing performance as the younger Wilson, with John Cusack as the musician in the 1980s — that depicts creative struggles in a way unlike any other similar film I’ve ever seen. It shows us how the misfiring of Wilson’s brain led him to make fascinating conceptual leaps in composing.
It may be an overwrought cliché to connect madness and creativity (and often that’s simply just plain wrong), but there is undoubted an agony that often accompanies the making of art. Here, that pain is poignant, powerful, and absolutely hair-raising.
US: rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV+
UK: rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV+
See Love & Mercy at Letterboxd for more viewing options, including in all other global regions.
