“Love & Mercy”: Brian Wilson's New Vibrations

The new biopic "Love & Mercy" offers an opportunity to re-examine – and celebrate – the Beach Boy whose life has been far from day at the beach.

The Beach Boys' landmark 1966 album "Pet Sounds,” which helped raise pop music to new heights of gravitas, if not immediate appreciation, brims with bittersweet classics like "Wouldn't it be Nice" and the ethereal "God Only Knows."

But the moody masterpiece of the recording is "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times," which goes beyond anodyne teenage angst about not fitting in to resound as the cry of a depressed man: "Sometimes, I feel very sad," sings Brian Wilson, whose plaintive tones suggests he means it.

These times, nearly a half-century later, appear made for "Love & Mercy," a new Wilson biopic set to be released Friday, offering an opportunity to re-examine – and celebrate – the Beach Boy whose life has been far from a day at the beach. 

Movies about musicians, from the uneven to the great, tend focus on those who left us too soon: "Amadeus," "The Glenn Miller Story," "The Buddy Holly Story," "La Bamba,” to name a few. There are exceptions, of course, including 2007's "I'm Not There," which really isn't a biopic as much as six actors – including Cate Blanchett – inhabiting the vacillating spirit of Bob Dylan, in a film that's as difficult to slap a label on as the troubadour's life and music.

Wilson, who never got Dylan-level adulation for his craft, would seem to have little in common with his fellow 1960s songwriting and performing icon. Yet Wilson, is a complex character in his own right, warranting the choice to have two actors portray him in "Love & Mercy": Paul Dano in the early Beach Boys years and John Cusack in the 1980s.

Wilson, after all has led multiple lives: there's the talented musician, who survived beatings from his Svengali-like father to lead the Beach Boys to early 1960s pop success by infusing bouncing Chuck Berry-style tunes with lush harmonies and lyrics depicting the good-times surfer life.

Then there's the visionary Brian Wilson who competed with the Beatles – and battled his own band mates – to combine increasingly sophisticated melodies and arrangements with introspective lyrics about the ache and joy of living in your own mind. Or living in his room: There's the Brian Wilson who suffered a mental breakdown in the late 1960s, living a Howard Hughes-like reclusive existence with a sandbox in his living room – and eventually being becoming a prisoner, according to his loved ones, of a manipulative therapist.

Over the past quarter century or so, Wilson has slowly emerged from his own hell and back into the popular consciousness. In 2004, he patched together "Smile," the innovative, trippy album his fellow Beach Boys wouldn't play along with at the peak of their fame. He's made fresh music, performing as a solo act and with the surviving Beach Boys in a 50th anniversary tour three years ago that thrilled those of us lucky enough to catch the show, even if the venture ended tinged by familiar familial and business-related acrimony.

Wilson's first cinematic foray came 20 years ago in the heartbreaking and painstakingly honest documentary "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times," which presented us with a man wearing his open-book life on his sleeve while working to restore his psyche. Unlike other musician biopics, we know going in that "Love & Mercy" doesn't end in tragedy – Brian Wilson's story is a slow, imperfect return from crushing adversity, with victories tempered by scars.

Director Bill Pohlad could easily could have gone Hollywood-style black-and-white, and called the film "Heroes and Villains," after a Beach Boys song originally intended for "Smile." But we'll take it as a positive sign that he plucked the title from a song off Wilson's 1988 first solo album, which represented as much a personal comeback as a professional one. "Oh, the loneliness in this world – well, it's just not fair," he sings, fighting back against a demon shared by many.

The film's greatest opportunity is to give Brian Wilson, who turns 73 this month, some of the love and mercy – and recognition – he richly deserves. Check out a preview of a movie (above) about a man whose talent for creating harmony in the recording studio too often sadly didn't extend to the rest of his life.

Jere Hester is Director of News Products and Projects at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. He is also the author of "Raising a Beatle Baby: How John, Paul, George and Ringo Helped us Come Together as a Family." Follow him on Twitter.

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