Beach Boys – Memphis Flyer

Brian Wilson’s rise to the heights of musical genius and subsequent fall into the depths of psychosis has been ripe for a biopic for years. The transatlantic rivalry between the Beatles and the Beach Boys that pushed both bands into new creative territory is one of rock music’s greatest myths. The Fab Four’s 1965 record Rubber Soul inspired Wilson to push his studio work further with 1966’s Pet Sounds, which in turn inspired the Beatles to rip up the rule book for 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Wilson’s rejoinder was to have been an album called Smile that, Beach Boys partisans claim, would have been the greatest rock album of all time. But Wilson had a nervous breakdown in the middle of the Smile recording sessions and the rest of the band, led by Mike Love, wrested musical control away from him, ceding the field to the Liverpudlians and dooming the American band to decades of formulaic surf nostalgia.

Director Bill Pohlad’s Love & Mercy gives myth the film treatment it deserves, not by creating an epic clash of musical titans, but by concentrating on Brian Wilson’s point of view. Pohlad is a veteran producer whose filmography includes Brokeback Mountain, The Tree of Life, and 12 Years a Slave, so he understood that the relatively small-scale and built-in audience allowed him to take creative chances. His experiments pay off handsomely. The film shuttles back and forth between the mid 1960s and the 1980s with two different actors playing Wilson in different periods of his life. Young Brian is Paul Dano, who portrays Wilson with wide eyes and an open mind but with a stinging emotional vulnerability. Old Brian is played by John Cusack, who is as foggy and frightened as Dano is clear and focused. Using multiple actors to play a famous figure has been tried before, most notably when Todd Haynes used six actors to play Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. But here the move feels completely appropriate. Wilson has said he looks back at the time before his breakdown and can’t recognize the person he used to be.

Elizabeth Banks and John Cusack

The 1960s segments tell the story of the creation of Pet Sounds, the recording of “Good Vibrations,” and the disastrous Smile sessions. Dano is brilliant as he fights off questions from his band, including Kenny Wormald as long-suffering Dennis Wilson and Jake Abel as the ambitious Mike Love. The high point of his performance is when he sings a sweet, aching version of “God Only Knows.” But his confidence melts when confronted with his manipulative, abusive father Murry Wilson (Bill Camp).

In the 1980s, we meet Cusack’s broken, scattered, middle-aged Brian as he haltingly reaches out to Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), a glammy, Southern California Cadillac saleswoman who acts as the audience’s way into Brian’s cloistered world. Oren Moverman and Michael Lerner’s script expertly dribbles out disturbing details of the reclusive rock star lorded over by his psychiatrist, Dr. Eugene Landy, played with gleeful evil by Paul Giamatti. Cusack, who has long been trapped in his own movie star persona, digs deep into this role, nailing Wilson’s shuffling walk and his pained expressions when he tries to play piano as well as he used to. Cusack gets some of the best lines in the film, like when Brian, explaining the creative process to Melinda, says, “Every once in a while, once in a blue moon, your soul comes out to play.”

Cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman, a frequent Wes Anderson collaborator, shoots Southern California as both beautiful and alienating, as appropriate to the story. But director Pohlad’s secret weapon is his incredible sound design team, led by Eugene Gearty, who mixes snippets of Beach Boys songs with swirling, ambient sounds to reflect Wilson’s inner state. In an age where directors are content to use the unprecedented technology available in modern movie theaters just to make subwoofer “whomp” noises to telegraph dramatic moments, Pohlad and Gearty create a subtle, complex soundscape worthy of a film about a sonic genius. With a substantive story, a passionate cast and crew, and an experimental eye and ear, Pohlad has crafted one of the best movies of the year.

Automotive and film technology came of age at roughly the same time, and cars have always been a particular source of fascination for filmmakers. When the first drive-in movie theater opened in New Jersey in 1933, it was the beginning of a potent and inevitable synergy between two of America’s favorite cultural forces. Movies sold the dream of freedom, and cars became the most prominent and expensive symbols of that freedom. People would pay to sit in their cars and watch movies about cars.

The theme of the next edition of the popular Time Warp Drive-In series (running the last Saturday of each month through October) is Hell On Wheels, which gave the organizers, filmmaker Mike McCarthy and Black Lodge Video proprietor Matthew Martin, plenty of choices for programming.

The night will kick off with George Lucas’ American Graffiti. The film was Lucas’ first big hit, made after the studio-destroying dystopian sci-fi film THX 1138 had all but ended his career. Few films can claim the deep cultural impact of Lucas’ Star Wars, but American Graffiti comes close. Its meandering, multi-character story structure bears a resemblance to Robert Altman or Richard Linklater’s work but is utterly unlike the Hero’s Journey plots that would come to be associated with Lucas’ later work. Still, Lucas’ techno-fetishism is on full display with the loving beauty shots of classic autos designed in the days before wind tunnels and ubiquitous seat belts.

Even though the film was set in 1962, the chronicle of aimless youth cruising around a sleepy California town kicked off a wave of nostalgia for all things 1950s. The pre-British Invasion rock-and-roll and doo-wop soundtrack became one of the best selling film soundtracks in history, and Ron Howard — who, as Opie on The Andy Griffith Show, was himself a bit of TV nostalgia — and Cindy Williams would ride the popularity of American Graffiti into starring roles on Happy Days and its spinoff, Laverene & Shirley. It also marked the big break of a struggling actor and part-time carpenter named Harrison Ford.

The second Hell on Wheels film, Two-Lane Blacktop, is a classic hot rod movie from 1971 starring James Taylor (yes, that James Taylor) and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson. If American Graffiti manifested America’s longing for a simpler time before the social upheaval of the 1960s, Two-Lane Blacktop was one of the counterculture’s dying gasps. It’s an Easy Rider-like plot with muscle cars: Two nameless street racers heading east from California challenge a square (Warren Oates) to a cross-country race to Washington, D.C. The dialog is sparse and the performances fairly flat, but the real point of Two-Lane Blacktop is the wide-open vistas of a now-vanished America.

The third film of the night, 1968’s Bullitt, is similarly light on dialog, but it is the opposite of counterculture. Steve McQueen at his sexiest plays a homicide cop trying to solve the murder of a mob informant. McQueen’s Frank Bullitt is the prototype of the “playing by his own rules” cop that would become so familiar in later films, but the movie’s real significance lies in the epic car chase that sees McQueen driving an iconic 1968 fastback Mustang through the streets of San Francisco set to Lalo Schifrin’s swinging jazz score. The oft-imitated but never equaled scene is worth the price of admission for the entire evening.

The program closes with Robert Mitchum playing a Tennessee bootlegger in1953’s legendary Thunder Road. Mitchum co-wrote the screenplay and produced the movie, which tells the story of a Korean War vet’s turbulent return to the violent world of moonshiners and flophouses. The noir-inflected film served as the template for dozens of hot rod exploitation stories, taught greasers to emulate Mitchum’s laconic cool, and even inspired Bruce Springsteen to write a song about it. It’s a fitting capper to a night of burning rubber and tail fins.