“Love & Mercy” Brian Wilson and the Myth of Creative Genius

The Beach Boys, Chuck Berry and the subtle whitewashing of music history

We went to see Entourage this weekend, and when that was over (it got a standing ovation — take that, critics!), snuck in to see Love & Mercy, the excellent new movie about Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys.

The film tells Wilson’s story in two particular epochs — the rise of the Beach Boys in the 60s; and subsequently, the 80s, when he’s insane and under the care of an abusive psychotherapist who treats him like a slave.

The younger Wilson is played by Paul Dano, the older by John Cusack. Both do a great job, but it’s in the younger years where we see Dano as Wilson toiling away in the studio, possessed by some higher power, trying to make the sounds he hears in his head come to life.

The effort Young Wilson expends is enough to drive him to the deep end, literally (he can’t even get his bandmates to swim out of the shallow part of a pool he’s wading around in), and the film does a great job exploring what music-making was like before we all began carrying around virtual recording studios in our backpacks.

Naturally, the Beach Boys, who would rather just do the same happy-go-lucky stuff they’d been doing for years, reject…