Love & Mercy- Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys Story

A long time ago my dad mentioned that Brian Wilson was the heart and soul of the Beach Boys. I was excited when I found out they were doing a biopic of sorts with Paul Dano as a young Wilson and John Cusack for an older Wilson. The movie spends time going over the writing/creating process for Wilson in the earlier years of the Beach Boys, though after at least their first successful album and firing their dad as manager. Wilson is a musical genius who would know exactly what he wanted without having to ever write it down on paper. He could blend choruses and different musical instruments together in his head, but like most geniuses struggled to verbalize it to others. The difficulties with this are shown, and it delves into his mental issues that shut him down for three years and various times throughout his life. There is so much to cover in his 50+ years of music, so the focus was mental issues, Beach Boys drama, and a bit about meeting his current wife. It does a really good job of blending those themes and Cusack and Dano both do great jobs with the difficult issue of playing a genius with severe mental issues (which they never tell you what the proper diagnosis ended up being, though they know mention it is not paranoid schizophrenia). Bottom Line: 7.6 out of 10. Fans of the Beach Boys should absolutely watch this. It was a $1.00 rental on Amazon Prime and it's certainly worth the watch to just have a view into the Beach Boys creative process I felt.