The Beach Boys
(PG, 113 minutes, Disney+)
4 stars
When you watch The Beach Boys, the new documentary from directors Frank Marshall (who directed a Bee Gees doco a few years back) and Thom Zimny, one of the things that stands out is the crazy amount of hit songs the band made within a decade.
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Much like The Beatles - the American band's good-natured rival and inspiration to produce better music - it's amazing to think that so much material which shaped the future of the music industry was produced in such a small amount of time.
It's especially crazy when you think about the fact that in the music industry these days, popular artists are lucky if they produce two albums in four years, where The Beach Boys released 11 albums within just four years in the early to mid-1960s.
The film features new and archive interviews with the band members and others close to them, as well as musicians (including Lindsey Buckingham, Ryan Tedder and Janelle Monae) and cultural writers who were inspired by The Beach Boys.
The documentary doesn't spend a great deal of time delving into chief songwriter/producer Brian Wilson's struggles with mental health (the film Love and Mercy, where Paul Dano and John Cusack play Brian at different points of his life, does that quite well), but it does provide a pretty decent timeline for the first 15 or so years of the band's existence.
We learn how the musically-inclined Wilson brothers - Brian, Dennis and Carl - started working on their harmonies on car trips firstly by happenstance, how cousin Mike Love, who was older and more gregarious, enjoyed spending time with family, and friend Al Jardine came along too, before heading off to college for a while.
Fresh interviews with Mike and Al provide the most interest, while it's the archive interviews with Brian, who doesn't say so much in the new footage, that provides a lot of background to the song creation process.
There's also audio from recording sessions of the band's former manager/head of publishing Murry Wilson - the Wilson brothers' father - and his unwelcome meddling. His abusiveness is also detailed, and the impact removing him from the management of the band - which was a literally and figuratively a family - had on morale.
Aside from the history of the band - which gets really interesting when Dennis starts hanging out with one Charles Manson - it's fantastic to just be reminded of the plethora of hits the group produced. From Surfin' USA and Fun, Fun, Fun to Good Vibrations and the truly spectacular God Only Knows.
As enjoyable as this film is, it's not without its flaws and omissions. It seems strange to cut off the storytelling somewhere in the early 80s, before the band delivered arguably one of their biggest hits of all time, the Cocktail tie-in song, Kokomo.
At this stage Full House actor John Stamos was regularly collaborating with the band, and appeared in the music video for that song playing percussion. He has continued to perform with the band in the decades since. The fact that he does not appear in the documentary at all is a surprise, especially when there are many other famous faces who share the impact that The Beach Boys had on them musically and culturally.
Kokomo's only appearance in the film is playing over the end credits. We also learn of Brian Wilson's fascination with Phil Spector's "wall of sound" approach and his love of his production of The Ronette's Be My Baby, but don't hear about Spector's crime-filled future.
Also missing is the deaths of Dennis and Carl Wilson, which are only mentioned in a title card right at the end.
These things seem like quite a miss for a film that deems itself "the definitive look at America's band".
