Pohlad: Love & Mercy (2015)

As the cycles of nostalgia and retromania get shorter and shorter, the idea of a singer being genuinely washed-up seems more and more foreign, let alone the idea of a singer being washed up for years and years, left to drift through a decade in which they have no part or place. Yet that’s exactly the starting point of this extraordinary biopic of Brian Wilson, which opens with Wilson, played by John Cusack, adrift in mid-80s Los Angeles, suffused with an aimless ambience that’s only exacerbated by his overmedication at the hands of court-appointed phyisician Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), as well as his burgeoning – his slowly burgeoning – relationship with Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), who steals the show with her mercurial, musical presence. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before we flashback to the 60s, where a younger Wilson, played this time by Paul Dano, is weathering the real or imagined criticisms of his father, friends and a delightfully unlikeable Mike Love, as he shuts himself up in the studio to record the soundscape that would form the backdrop to Pet Sounds and the aborted Smile sessions. At one level, that’s a great move for fans, since it offers the amazing – and uncanny – opportunity to witness these canonical accompaniments shorn of their vocals as they come together piece by piece. Yet despite a few nods in the direction of Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil, director Brian Pohlad doesn’t ultimately seem interested in the stylised documentary approach that characterises so many biopics, nor in any kind of blow-by-blow fandom-fixation on how Pet Sounds came to be. Instead, this is very much a chamber pop drama, an attempt to capture how it felt to be Brian Wilson as he approached the outer limits of his studio self. As a result, Wilson really comes off as an antenna more than a character, gateway to an aural universe that we can still just hear in the 60s segments, but which has totally exceeded us in the 80s segments, shrouding him in the mystical silence of someone receiving transmissions from a distant star, too remote for mere human perception. In that sense, Pet Sounds starts to feel less and less like a piece of music than a voyage to the edge of the sonic universe, as Pohlad erects even the most cacaphonous moments in the recording sessions upon a quietness that just gets deeper and deeper as the album comes together, the kind of baroque stillness that arises at key points within the album itself, as if to suggest something lurking just beneath the threshold of audibility, a silky sombience that makes you feel as if you can hear the distant thud of surf in almost any space. At one level, then, there’s a sense of decline as we move from the 60s to the 80s, but there’s also a sense that Wilson is inhabiting Pet Sounds' silences as never before, paused in a state of perpetual rapture that Ledbetter doesn’t exactly puncture so much as learn to cohabitate and expand, with a breathless wonder that often makes this feel like a tribute to Say Anything as much as a tribute to Wilson. In that sense, it feels less like a paean to Pet Sounds than to Brian Wilson, Wilson’s first solo album, which was released a couple of years after he met Ledbetter, and boasts “Love and Mercy” as its opening track. Contra to conventional or canonical wisdom, that’s the real masterpiece here – the album Pet Sounds almost was and that Smile should have been – as Pohlad takes its signature synth substrate and spins it out across nearly every scene, as if the onset of Wilson's solo career required a better and stranger vibration than anything that had come before.