Cusack doesn’t look much like Dano but he has the same expression of sincerity and openness, the integrity of a child in the fragile mind of an infantilized adult trapped by an abusive father figure who feeds off his talent. And it presents Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), who meets the confused but sincere older Brian and sees through Landy’s pose of benevolent protection, as the film’s true hero.ĭano’s baby face give him the look of a boy genius in musical wonderland, a big kid as a musical wunderkind. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti in sleazy, medical huckster mode), the radical psychotherapist who became his legal guardian. Where the 1995 documentary I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times slipped into hagiography that cheered his genius and hissed the villains who broke his spirit, this dramatization is more interested in exploring the enthusiastic, boyish musical genius who slipped into self-doubt and paranoia at the height of his creative powers and ended up in a nightmarish ordeal with Dr. Love & Mercy (2014), a biopic that parallels the boyish enthusiasm and free-flowing creative drive of young visionary Brian (played by Paul Dano) with the frail, fragile, terrified older Brian (John Cusack), is as perceptive and as interesting as you could hope for. Capturing the life of Brian Wilson, the troubled genius who pushed the surf pop sound of The Beach Boys into psychedelic symphonies as he spiraled into depression, in just a few key years is a tricky proposition.
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