‘The Beach Boys’ review: re-telling the Californian lads’ not-always-sunny story

For The Beatles, The Rolling Stones were more chart inconvenience than creative rivals. The real competition and inspiration, in their eyes, lay across the pond in the form of Bob Dylan’s firebrand folk and a bunch of harmonising heartthrobs in striped surf-wear, sieving textural gold from the Santa Monica sands. It was hearing The Beach Boys’ seminal 1966 ‘Pet Sounds’ album that spurred John Lennon and Paul McCartney on to their most radical sonic evolutions on ‘Revolver’ and ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, and so there’s a solid logic to Disney+ following the success of Peter Jackson’s mammoth Get Back series with a feature-length dive into the story of their (friendly) Californian rivals.

Directors Frank Marshall and Thom Zimney have far less material to work with than Jackson enjoyed. Several key players – Wilson brothers Carl and Dennis – are sadly no longer with us and main man Brian Wilson, already uncomfortable and defensive in interviews for quite some time, is now under a conservatorship due to his cognitive decline. So only Mike Love, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston (plus a selection of occasional members) are able to provide fresh insight. Archive footage, too, is limited, but the interviews with Carl, Dennis and Brian uncovered are drawn from refreshingly erudite times; Brian in particular is captured as the intense young innovator he once was.

Brian’s story – the early songwriting genius, the on-the-road breakdown, the studio retreat, the acid-aided decline, the fire helmets – is perhaps an over-told one; there was even a biopic, Love & Mercy, covering the same ground more thoroughly in 2014. But The Beach Boys makes up for its narrative familiarity by exploring some of the lesser-known behind-the-scenes tidbits. Reminiscences from the mid-‘60s touring mania lift an inevitably murky section of the film as a tortured Brian ensconces himself in the studio with The Wrecking Crew from 1965, but there are darker moments ahead as Dennis falls in with Charles Manson and the Wilsons’ father and manager Murry Wilson becomes increasingly abusive and manipulative; his relationship with the group ultimately breaks down when he sells the publishing rights for the group’s catalogue for a fraction of its ultimate worth without their knowledge, assuming they’d eventually crash and burn.

That the film cuts the story short before Dennis’ death by drowning in 1983, though, gives this classically traumatic rollercoaster tale a certain lightness. Touches such as their teenage harmonising and their popular resurgence following 1974’s ‘Endless Summer’ compilation shine through. We learn that, by getting their family to phone in radio votes for their 1961 debut single ‘Surfin’’, they were arguably one of the first “industry plants”, and much is made of their formative influence on the Californian dream. The film’s most heart-breaking moment comes with Love in tears over the fact that the band’s legal issues left them so dislocated that he couldn’t tell Brian that he loves him – but we end on a shot of the band’s surviving members gathering on a beach, differences set far aside. Vibrations remain good.