"Can we get a horse in here?"
It is a reasonable question – can we bring a steed into a recording studio – when one is creating a masterpiece album called Pet Sounds, which Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys did in the late 1960s, when "far-out" was a catchphrase for a reason. And Wilson, the California band's uncommon maestro and magic, was absolutely up for the unconventional. He was full to the brim – layers and layers of the unusual.
Perhaps with that in mind, director Bill Pohlad strove for an irregular biopic, with Wilson portrayed in the sympathetic, dark and compelling Love & Mercy by not one but two actors: Paul Dano, quite brilliant as the young, vulnerable, mop-topped wunderkind who heard such wild sounds in his head; and John Cusack, less interesting as Wilson in the 1980s, when the comeback-trail musician was shell-shocked, overwhelmed and overmedicated by Eugene Landy, a controversial psychotherapist/Svengali.
Originally there was to be a third era/persona – the 1970s, Wilson's beard and bathrobe years – but Pohlad and screenwriter Oren Moverman (who co-wrote 2007's I'm Not There, in which six characters represent Bob Dylan) went double-barrel only.
Love & Mercy takes its title from a Wilson song from 1988, post-Beach Boys. He saw love as a gentle, required and ephemeral thing, while mercy was an act often more desperately required. For Wilson, his mercy comes from Melinda Ledbetter, the nervy Cadillac saleswoman and former model (portrayed by Elizabeth Banks with nuance) who is intrigued, puzzled and charmed by midlife Wilson. She fights with the controversially domineering Landy over the timid, has-been pop star.
Landy is played by the adept Paul Giamatti, who does villainy well. Helluva wig on Giamatti, too – best rug performance since the oriental carpet in The Big Lebowski. Given that Landy is portrayed as such a colossal meanie here and that Ledbetter (who would become Wilson's wife) is presented as a near angel, it should be noted that both Wilson and Ledbetter co-operated in the creation of the long-in-the-making film.
On screen, Giamatti and Banks are brilliant in their battle for the Beach Boy. They crowd out Cusack, whose impulsive, soft-voiced man-child is so small in comparison.
Love & Mercy toggles back and forth in time, with the early Beach Boy days much more fascinating. The sun-splashed young Wilson battles with his calculating father and skeptical bandmates, who resist the composer's shift from harmonic pop fluff to complicated rock.
Studio sessions are shot almost documentary-style by Pohlad, an admirer of Michael Lindsay-Hogg's Let It Be and Jean-Luc Godard's Sympathy for the Devil. Atticus Ross's score is inventive, not a hit parade. Using the original studio tracks from the Beach Boys' recordings from the 1960s, Ross reworks them impressionistically – a trippy montage inside Wilson's often freaked-out musical mind.
It's as if Wilson took in too much. Love & Mercy is the title of this worthy, imaginative biopic, but it is another Wilson song, I Just Wasn't Made for These Times, that defines the man better, at least as he is presented here. We see the pop maestro as misunderstood, confused and alienated – ahead of his time or just not up to it. Either way, the man was far-out, and so is this film.
Brad Wheeler