Today saw the debut of the new feature-length documentary The Beach Boys on Disney+, but earlier this week I was able to attend an early screening of the film. Below are my thoughts on this release.
I’m admittedly getting up there in age, but I’m not quite old enough to have been around when The Beach Boys were at the peak of their popularity (that would have been about 15 years before I was born). But still, even throughout the 1980s– and beyond– their music was ubiquitous in my life. It helped that family and friends I grew up with were into them as well, but there’s something so timeless about their hits and some of their better-known albums that I’ve dipped in and out of obsessions with their music for the past 40+ years. But unlike their big rivals from across the pond The Beatles, I’ve never been terribly fascinated by the behind-the-music story of this band. Which is a shame because, as the new The Beach Boys documentary proves, their narrative is a captivating one. Co-directed by Frank Marshall (producer of mega-hits like Raiders of the Lost Ark and director of Congo and Arachnophobia) with Thom Zimny (Sly, Bruce Springsteen’s Letters to You), The Beach Boys takes a fairly traditional approach to doc-making, but its subject matter is rich and interesting enough to transcend the average look at a familiar band.
As you might guess, the movie begins at the beginning with the tale of three brothers, one cousin, and one good friend (all identified as such in the titles below their names) who played music together in their garage until family members helped them get instruments and time together in a recording studio. From that point on The Beach Boys pretty much take off like a rocket, and the film follows them through the highs of the early 1960s, the aforementioned creative rivalry with The Beatles (this might have been my favorite part, especially when one interviewee framed it more as a collaboration, which really opened my eyes), ups and downs in touring around the world and dealing with an overbearing father-turned-manager, the retreat of songwriter Brian Wilson from performing live and then public life, and on into a late-60s-through-most-of-the-70s funk that saw the band being largely left behind by a changing world. Much attention is paid to the (entirely deserved, by all accounts) labeling of Brian as a musical genius and his mid-60s desire to stray from the band’s surf-rock roots into something entirely more experimental and out-there as far as pop records go, not to mention the rest of the group’s struggle to live in his creative shadow, especially singer and lyricist Mike Love, who insists he was robbed of songwriting credits on a number of the Beach Boys’ biggest hits.
There’s a familiar arc here to anyone who has ever watched a biopic or documentary about musicians before, but it’s all presented in a way that felt fresh and new to me, certainly holding my attention for its runtime, and occasionally bringing me to minor epiphanies about what makes The Beach Boys’ music so great and arguing me toward revisiting everything they put out in the 60s with a newfound appreciation. All that said, I do have a couple of critiques: the first being that Marshall and Zimny have chosen to crop and/or stretch all of the (plentiful) archival footage from its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio into the 16:9 widescreen shape of a Disney+-enabled modern-day television screen. This makes almost every shot (excluding the more recent interview footage with the Boys and fellow musical artists like Janelle Monáe and Lindsay Buckingham) feel cramped and poorly composed, so I really, really wish they had just pillar-boxed all of that stuff instead, preserving its authenticity. The other thing is that some stuff feels glossed over– we do get a very brief treatise about the band’s connections to Charles Manson, but there’s absolutely no mention of Dr. Eugene Landy, and even The Beach Boys’ late-80s comeback hit “Kokomo” is overlooked until it plays over the end credits. But on the whole, I would say that this doc by-and-large lives up to its poster’s promise of being “The Definitive Look at America’s Band,” and it ends on an optimistic note– undoubtedly cementing the legacy of Brian, Mike, Carl, Dennis, Al, and the other rotating members in a pop-culture time capsule– that will have you humming “Don’t Worry Baby” the rest of the day like I did.
The Beach Boys is now available to stream, exclusively via Disney+.
My grade: 4 ½ out of 5 clips of Brian Wilson talking about how certain Beatles songs were “not that great.”