Critics reviews

Love & Mercy doesn't pluck at the heartstrings, but Wilson's story is at times terrifying, and the system of abuse he experienced is chilling. Instead, each musical element, each chord, each sound is crisply produced and played in unison to form the song of his life. It's bittersweet and melancholic, always captivating, holding the irrefutable truth of a pop lyric. Melinda emerges through the haze of bells and whistles, a bassline note of hope ringing as a constant.

Pohlad's film is good at probing the line between radical creativity and mental disarray; arguably less good at getting Wilson back on the safe side of it. But it leaves you in no doubt that the man's a genius.

Adeptly flitting back and forth across the years, switching from documentary-style in-studio footage to rather more measured coverage of Brian's 80s travails, and even switching perspectives from Banks's sympathetic outsider perspective to a more interior take on Brian's eventual self-realisation, the result is a film which cannily finds its own distinctive form as it goes along, confidently dispensing with much biopic cliché en route.

Anyone who suppresses a yawn at the thought of another stolid, rise-to-fame music biopic along the lines of Ray (2004) or Walk the Line (2005) can take heart: Bill Pohlad's take on the famously troubled career of Brian Wilson, moving spirit behind 60s surf-rock band The Beach Boys, sets out to do something very different from the norm and for the most part pulls it off.

Love & Mercy is what the title suggests: a biopic that's tender and merciful. At times, it has to struggle to convey the inner life of Wilson — his drug-use days, his gradual collapse, the noise in his head, culminating in the dream scene near the end that's probably too heavy-handed. But it's a movie anchored firmly in the sympathy for the man who deserves more than a bed-bound life fed by excessive medication, the rock god who has fallen but bumped into his salvation. God truly only knows.

The fact that [Dano and Cusack] look really nothing alike is irrelevant, because Love & Mercy is more interested in the psychology of the man than of being a straight and "respectful" biopic. It's more innovative than the usual.

Longtime producer Pohlad ("Brokeback Mountain," "12 Years A Slave"), working from a daring script by Oren Moverman and Michael Alan Lerner, and using two first-rate actors to play Wilson at two turning points in his life, lavishes his material with love, attention to detail, and empathetic imagination. The result is a story that's hair-raisingly watchable and frequently moving, regardless of what you believe you might already know of Wilson's life.

The beauty, and the horror, of Bill Pohlad's exhilarating and inventive Love & Mercy — which traces the sine wave of Wilson's troubled adult life using two actors, Paul Dano and John Cusack — is the sense it gives us of the world passing through Brian Wilson's ears... Love & Mercy is surprisingly specific in exploring both the mystery and craftsmanship of song creation.

Bill Pohlad, who seems never to have met a metaphor he couldn't bludgeon into its most rudimentary and literal interpretation, juxtaposes the first of Ross's compositions with a fade-in to a close-up of an ear. As a visualization of the mind of a sui generis talent reckoning with the voices in his head, this image is functional, but Love & Mercy's interpretation of genius is overwhelmed by its reliance on malevolent guardians as both a narrative fulcrum and an engine used to manufacture pity.

When Pohlad takes his most deliberate turn to psychedelia, near the end, using Kubrick's 2001 ages-of-man perspective shifts to integrate his two Wilsons, the music is there to meet him: beatific, baroque, nostalgic, avant-garde, of both Eisenhower's America and Manson's. It may be too much to ask any film to remain in this world throughout. But this one transcends itself when it dares try.

This is a movie that needs magic or ingenuity or a titanic performance to dispel skepticism. Instead, it has Paul Giamatti, all but twirling a mustache as Eugene Landy, the therapist who kept Wilson in a prison of pills and misdiagnoses.