Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's movie is the 2014 biographical drama "Love and Mercy," directed by Bill Pohlad from a screenplay by Oren Moverman and Michael Alan Lerner.

"Love and Mercy" stars John Cusack, Paul Dano, Elizabeth Banks, and Paul Giamatti with support from Jake Abel, Kenny Wormald, Brett Davern, Graham Rogers, Erin Darke, and Bill Camp.

"Love and Mercy" covers two distinct periods in the life of Brian Wilson, co-founder and songwriter for the sixties rock group The Beach Boys with two different actors portraying Wilson.

Paul Dano plays Brian Wilson during the Beach Boys heyday in the sixties and John Cusack plays Wilson in the years 1986 and 1987.

The film moves back and forth between these two periods in Brian Wilson's life to follow the course of his dissent into the mental illness on the one hand and the events leading to his gradual recovery on the other.

At the same time, the filmmakers worked to give the audience a sense of what Brian Wilson's interior life was like, both as the fertile ground of his creative powers and the source of his mental anguish.

The first narrative line begins in 1986 when Melinda Ledbetter, a saleswoman at a Beverly Hills Cadillac dealership, helps a pleasant, somewhat distracted, middle-aged man who wants to buy a car.

They sit in a Fleetwood together for a few minutes while he gets a feel for the car until they're interrupted by a man Melinda's customer identifies as his bodyguard.

When he decides to buy the Fleetwood, the specific one they've been sitting in, she learns that her customer is Brian Wilson, formerly of the Beach Boys.

Shortly afterwards, they begin dating, but they're always accompanied by other people, notably Brian's therapist, Dr. Eugene Landy, who appears to be in control of everything Brian does.

The second narrative line begins in 1964 when the Beach Boys, led by Brian and his brothers Dennis and Carl, his cousin Mike Love, and their friend Al Jardine, are topping the rock charts with their musical odes to cars, surfing, sun, fun, and beach bunnies.

But touring triggers anxiety attacks for Brian, and he begs off a trip to Japan to work on music for the group's next album.

He produces innovative music and guides a group of session musicians through it meticulously to achieve the effects he wants.

But the other Beach Boys are impatient with him and just want to turn out more hits.

As time goes on and Brian's mental condition worsens, he begins a long, dark period of his life that will only begin to brighten when he meets Melinda Ledbetter at a Cadillac agency.

The Beach Boys were both the most popular and the most influential of the rock groups that created the California sound in the early sixties.

Their 1961 debut single "Surfin'" was one of the seminal works that celebrated a southern California youth culture focused on high school, fast cars, the beach, and surfing as a sport for boys and girls.

Surfing featured prominently in several of the Beach Boys' early hits including "Surfin' Safari" in 1962, "Surfin' USA" based on Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen," and "Surfer Girl" in 1963.

There were also songs about hot rods like "409" in 1962 and "Little Deuce Coupe" the next year.

And about the sort of fun to be had in cars either for a girl in "Fun, Fun, Fun," or a group of guys in "I Get Around," both released in 1963.

And always, always songs about dancing and romancing.

"Dance, Dance, Dance" in 1964, "Do You Wanna Dance," "Help me Rhonda," "California Girls," and "Barbara Ann" in 1965, and "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and "Good Vibrations" in 1966.

The Beach Boys' intricate harmonies, often complex musical compositions, and innovative instrumentations with everything from Moog synthesizers to the Theremin that created the unforgettable electronic sound for the song "Good Vibrations," made them one of the few American rock groups to remain popular during the so-called British Invasion in the mid-sixties.

But the Beach Boys' intricate harmonies and instrumentations came at a high, personal cost for Brian Wilson.

There were several abortive attempts to produce a film about Brian Wilson's life before "Love and Mercy" was released in 2014.

There were two earlier made for television movies about the Beach Boys, "Summer Dreams" the Story of The Beach Boys in 1990, and "The Beach Boys an American Family" 10 years later but neither one was particularly faithful to the group's true story.

Bill Pollard's primary work in Hollywood was as a producer.

His films include "Brokeback Mountain" in 2005, "Into the Wild" in 2007, and "12 Years A Slave" in 2013.

He had directed only one film, 1990s "Old Explorers" before beginning work on "Love and Mercy".

Pollard had was initially inspired by a 1997 Beach Boys box set "The Pet Sounds Sessions", to begin investigating the story of Brian Wilson's life.

Wilson's second wife, Melinda Ledbetter, was actively involved in the movie's development, with occasional input from Wilson himself.

After the misrepresentations that characterized the two made for television movies, Pollard and his team were particularly concerned to convey Wilson's story accurately, without the usual accommodations made to cinematic traditions by many films based on real events.

He said in June of 2015, "There are so many things that went on in his life that were like, you've got to be kidding.

Nobody's ever going to believe that.

But with a lot of things in the movie we didn't want to back away from it, or create something that was false so we tried to make it as genuine as we could."

Inevitably, however, some of the people portrayed in the film felt that they had been slighted or misrepresented.

Mike Love, for example, said "He never had any significant conflicts with his cousin Brian, about the direction of the Beach Boys or their music."

Van Dyke Parks, who collaborated with Brian Wilson on "Smile", felt his contributions were overlooked.

The efforts to help Brian by other members of the Wilson family, especially Brian's brother, Carl, who were diligently to rescue Brian from his entanglement with Dr. Landy, receive scant attention in "Love and Mercy".

But this is arguably more a matter of the filmers selecting what material they wish to include then deliberately misrepresenting events.

At least one Beach Boy, Al Jardine, who was there, called the movie "A great biography, and pretty darn close to the way I remember it."

Understandably perhaps, Dr. Paul Landys son Evan, was not happy with the way the film portrayed his father who died in 2006.

Co-screenwriter Oren Moverman, who did extensive research and interviewed people who had known Brian Wilson during the years the movie was to cover, admitted Landy was the most difficult character to convey properly in the screenplay.

Moverman was afraid Landys behavior would be hard for audiences to accept.

He said, "Even though many things that he says in the movie I actually have recordings of, in real life he was a cartoon, and in real life he was so over the top."

Melinda Ledbetter noted the film was not able to fully convey the persistently corrosive nature of Landy's treatment of Brian Wilson.

"You don't get a sense of it, of the movie", she said, "but it hacked out on daily basis for years."

"Love and Mercy" was well received by critics and named one of the year's best movies by both Time and Rolling Stone, which called it "One of the best music biopics ever."

Both Paul Dano and John Cusack were praised for their acting.

Although many reviewers gave Dano the edge because of his resemblance to the young Brian Wilson.

Dano also plays Wilson during what is clearly the more engaging part of the movie, dealing with his creative peak.

Critic Richard Porton conceded as much.

For better or worse, Brian Wilson is suitably charismatic when he is absolutely bonkers and hearing voices, and relatively boring after he is supposedly cured by a new drug regimen and his wife's benevolence.

If this is the case, it's because what draws us to the story of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys in the first place is the music.

"Love and Mercy" attempts to show how the music arose in part, out of Wilson's mental difficulties.

Critic Anne Powers pointed out on National Public Radio, ""Love and Mercy" makes a fascinating leap by suggesting that the Beach Boys auteur constructed his inimitable soundscapes as a way of dealing with auditory hallucinations, making pop songs that go deep in part because they were designed to converse with the voices in his head."

"Love and Mercy's" use of soundscapes and visual collage attempt to communicate something new to its audience, in much the same way, Brian Wilson communicated with his by making it all about the music.

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.