A music biopice that goes way beyond the expectations of the genre - Love & Mercy

Bill Poahlad's excellent biopic on Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys, goes way beyond the standard and the formula of so many recent rock biopics - up from poverty, sudden success, ruined by success, later-career revival ... a la Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, James Brown, et al - some of these being pretty good pictures and certainly opportunities to enjoy some excellent music if nothing else. But Love & Mercy goes way beyond these, in truly examining a very disturbed young man who achieved greatness almost in spite of himself and then lived a difficult and tortured life in which he almost had to hide from his fame, in which he was mistreated and abused by the lechers that surrounded him and pretended to act in his best interest, and in his way kept wanting to make music and art - and struggled to have a normal life as husband and father - which, by all accounts, it seems he has been able to do at long last. Smartly, the movie has two Brian Wilsons, both excellent: Dano as the young BW, just starting to movie away from his brothers and others in the pop group and to push them into much more complex and unusual musical structures and orchestrations, with they and most of the fan base resisted - and John Cusak as the mature BW, a broken man kept almost imprisoned by his so-called guardian (a bit over-played by Paul Giamatti) who over-medicates him and controls all of his interactions w/ others. Somehow Pohlad blends these two story lines so that they supplement each other; the movie is visually imaginative, with some great hand-held camera sequence and, surprisingly, excellent use of "flashbacks" to scenes of parental abuse and a nervous breakdown while flying in a private jet. Usually these devices crew up a film (James Brown biopic, e.g.), but here the narrative is easy to follow and of course the film has a terrific sound track - and the many scenes of BW in studio sessions struggling to get the sound he wants from a classically trained set of session musicians helps us see the complexity and imagination behind some of the seemingly simple harmonies and orchestration of Beach Boys later hits - Good Vibrations being one example. The artist or musician or writer tortured by demons is a cliche of course, but it's a cliche based on some reality, too, and this movie gets at the personal torment as well as or better than any other of the genre. We feel sorrow and pity for BW throughout, as well as admiration - and yet we can also see why his band mates pushed back and resisted the changes he was pushing - it was a journey he was destined to take alone.