Love and Mercy (2015)

This is a complicated movie about a complicated man.  The subject is Brian Wilson, who along with two of his brothers, a cousin, and a friend were the 1960's LA garage band phenomena of The Beach Boys.  Wilson was credited with the creative piece of the band, and the movie follows him at two periods in his life, when he was part of the Beach Boys and then later when he was being controlled by a psychologist and was quite dependent.

The movie does something that is risky--it has two actors playing the character at two different points in time.  Paul Dano is the young Wilson and John Cusack is the elder Wilson.  The movie pulls this off quite well, and while it is very hard to watch, it is not because of the acting.  Wilson had a very abusive father, both physically and verbally, and even though the band fired him as their manager, Wilson remained quite dependent on his father's approval, which he was never going to get.  He developed crippling anxiety and at some point slipped into psychosis, the reason not being all that clear, but options include drugs, personality, primary psychotic illness or a combination of them.  In any case, the story is well told, and the mid 1960's sequences are a glimpse of the music scene of the time.