Love & Mercy

Love & Mercy (2015) is Bill Pohlad's biographical drama about Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson — watch it online on iFILM. The film runs two timelines in parallel. Paul Dano plays the young Brian in the 1960s, locked in the studio crafting the orchestral textures of Pet Sounds while his grip on reality frays. John Cusack plays the same man twenty years later, living under the near-total control of psychiatrist Dr. Eugene Landy.

The double-casting shouldn't work as well as it does. Dano captures the obsessive precision of someone hearing sounds nobody else can hear yet; Cusack plays diminishment — a man who was once at the center of American pop culture, now unable to choose his own meals. Paul Giamatti as Landy avoids playing him as a cartoon: the menace is in the system he builds around Wilson. Elizabeth Banks plays Melinda Ledbetter, a car saleswoman who falls for the patient she's just met and slowly becomes his only way out.

Producer-turned-director Pohlad had backed 12 Years a Slave and Brokeback Mountain before making this his feature debut. What he got right is rare in music biopics: the creative process feels real, not performed. Stream Love & Mercy (2015) online on iFILM.