GamesRadar+ Verdict
Don’t worry, baby: Pohlad’s biopic is reverent, duly, but also rich, clever, warm and sensitive. Banks and Giamatti provide anchor, Cusack impresses and Dano surfs to glory.
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Life of Brian…
“It should sound like a cry, but sort of in a good way,” says The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson in Bill Pohlad’s biopic, educating his musicians in the art of sweetly sad pop.
It learns from Wilson’s cliché-busting ingenuity. After all, any conventional attempt to transcribe his life directly would surely risk bum notes: if it weren’t true, would you believe Wilson’s tale of troubled childhood, genius, mental illness, chemical dependency, ‘radical’ (read: troubling) therapy and unlikely but exultant rebirth?
Pohlad’s solution is to channel Wilson through his songs’ style and subjects, not unlike Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, a seven-actor Bob Dylan composite designed to convey his Bobness’ mysterious ways. Pohlad lacks Haynes’ visual pizzazz but he has his writer (Oren Moverman) and two brilliant Brians.
Playing the ’80s-era Brian, John Cusack seems studied initially, a natural live-wire struggling to restrain himself, until that mannered delivery gradually hits Wilson’s strange mix of guarded and disarmingly direct.
But Paul Dano is a revelatory instant hit, a heart-rending picture of puppy-ish innocence wracked with genius.
As Wilson the younger (’60s version) aspires to transfer the symphonic sound-worlds in his brain to peak-Beach Boys LP Pet Sounds, music lovers will get excitations; when the noises from without (bullying dad, peanut-minded bandmate Mike Love) and within (plus copious LSD intake) become too much, his retreat to his home-based sandpit and subsequent breakdown devastate.
Enter the heroes and villains, creepin- a-cardi Dr Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti) and saintly car saleswoman Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks). The lines of demarcation are tidily drawn here – manipulative quack, woman holding the car-keys to freedom – but Giamatti and Banks anchor near-clichés in controlled, non-showy conviction. If Wilson’s salvation beggars belief, it isn’t the only miracle on show.
As Pohlad’s elegant 360-degree studio pans show Wilson summoning magic from turmoil, working musicians, hairpins, bicycle bells and even barking dogs, one thing’s certain: you’ll believe in Brian Wilson anew.
