Love & Mercy Review: John Cusack and Paul Dano Bring Beach Boy Brian Wilson to Life — collider.com

The Beach Boys are one of my favorite bands of all time, and their seminal 1966 album Pet Sounds is also one of my favorite albums of all time, so I came into director Bill Pohlad’s Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy with high expectations and a certain degree of skepticism.  As it turns out, the film is actually really good.  Pohlad takes a non-traditional approach to the biopic genre by splitting the story between young Brian Wilson (Paul Dano) and older Brian Wilson (John Cusack), focusing on the creation of Pet Sounds and the troubled SMiLE in the Dano timeline and Wilson’s severe mental illness and abusive relationship with his caretaker in the Cusack one.  Both actors rise to the challenge, with Cusack turning in his best performance in years, and Pohlad ends up crafting not only one of the more interesting biopics to come along in a while, but also a moving and honest chronicle of mental illness and success.

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