At the same time, the film is surprisingly down to earth. Pohlad produced Terrence Malick’s Palme d’Or winner The Tree of Life and you can sniff Malick’s influence in some of the film’s more impressionistic visual sequences. Their portrayals of Brian complement each other although both approach their roles in different ways. The switches between Dano and Cusack are seamless. (It really is a case of “God Only Knows” where such strange and distinctive music came from.) At the same time, he preserves Brian’s mystique. He is drawing our attention to the circumstances in which Brian Wilson wrote his celestial harmonies. Pohlad’s greatest service to his subject is to foreground the music. Love & Mercy takes us to places that more traditional biopics or rock docs could not reach. Here, she is in a far more subtle and affecting groove as the loyal, strong-willed woman won over by Brian’s Forrest Gump-like naiveté. Banks is best known for playing the vain and over-dressed Effie Trinket in the Hunger Games franchise. The film deals with his burgeoning love affair with car saleswoman Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) in a remarkably gentle and tender fashion. Brian-Future is a damaged figure but Cusack refuses to play him simply as a victim: he brings a sly, flirtatious humour to the role. Somewhere along the way, the character has had a disastrous breakdown we learn that he spent more than three years in bed. Pohlad cross-cuts between events in the lives of Brian-Past and Brian-Future. His interest is as much in how the music was constructed as in the music itself. Nor does Pohlad pack the soundtrack with Beach Boys hits in the mindless jukebox fashion that a more conventional biopic might have done. For example, rather than go into morbid detail about the death of Brian’s brother, the incident is simply referred to in a line of dialogue. Key biographical incidents are referred to only in passing. Pohlad doesn’t feel an obligation to take us through his subject’s childhood or to fill in all the missing blanks in the story. One of the great strengths of Love & Mercy is that it refuses to be straitjacketed by chronology.
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