Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road: Pop Music’s Troubled Genius in the Passenger Seat

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B-plus

For most of the documentary, Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road, the Beach Boys’ founder Brian Wilson sits in the passenger seat of a car. 

It’s not a T-Bird, GTO or Little Deuce Coupe, but a humble  SUV driven by his friend, Rolling Stone journalist Jason Fine, while Fine asks him questions about his life and career.

From time to time, Fine loads up some of the Wilson’s music on the car sound system as Wilson face registers his reaction and he intermittently responds. The style is informal.

Beach Boy Brian Wilson and his pal, Rolling Stone journalist Jason Fine in the warm California sun.

Sometimes, Brian asks Jason questions: “What are you going to have at the deli?” 

For inquiring minds who wish to know, both men had Cobb salads at the Beverly Hills Deli.  Jason had a cola and Brian finished his meal with a sundae.

The pair drive through Los Angeles, to some of the places the Beach Boys lived in and made famous, including Malibu’s Paradise Cove, where the cover of their first album, Surfin' Safari was shot. 

Brian Wilson, now 79, has struggled with a “schizo-affective” disorder and auditory hallucinations since he was 21. He has an unusual way of talking, sometimes in flat staccato rhythms. His gaze, through a half-century of photographs, often looks guarded or fearful.

“What do you do when you’re scared?” he asks Fine at one point.

He obviously finds Fine a calming presence and, at one point, compliments the journalist on his “consistent” calm speaking style.

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While no one would call Fine’s interview hard-hitting, he gets Wilson to talk about painful things here — his abusive father Murry Wilson, the also abusive psychotherapist Eugene Landy, who ruled his life for most of the 1980s, and the deaths of his brothers, Dennis, at 39, and Carl, at 51. 

As well as the driving footage, the film by Brent Wilson (no relation) includes clips of fellow musicians discussing and praising the songwriter’s work. They include laudatory commentary from Bruce Springsteen: “The beauty of it carries a sense of joyfulness even in the pain of living.” And Elton John “He had an orchestra in his head. The Beatles had George Martin … Brian just had himself.”

Producer Don Was (who made his own 1995 documentary about Wilson, I Just Wasn't Made for These Times), isolates the multi-part carousel of vocals on God Only Knows. For classical music cred, the Los Angeles Philharmonic music director, Gustavo Dudamel compares Wilson’s melodies with those of Mahler and Schubert. (Paul McCartney sometimes gets the Schubert comparison, too). 

The celebrity praise grows repetitive, and Wilson himself has little to say about his process except that the music comes from his brain into his fingers. 

But producer songwriter, Linda Perry, offers the provocative idea that you can hear Wilson’s mental struggle in the compositions, the hymnal quality, the soothing melodies over the churning complexity beneath. Clearly, Wilson’s emotional relationship to music is in no sense typical. (At one point, Wilson says the Doobie Brother’s 1979 hit, What A Fool Believes, “scared” him.)

Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road, which was executive produced by Wilson and his wife, Melinda, is consciously celebratory. Much of the film follows the period after 2004, when Wilson took up touring again and resurrected the album project, Smile, a collaboration with Van Dyke Parks which he had begun and abandoned forty years previously. Under the title The Smile Sessions, it won a 2011 Grammy. 

We see Wilson with his current band in concert at various venues, and in the studio in scenes that have the thrill of artistic creation, tasking his musicians with learning and playing a new composition.

Though not a deep musical dive and offering little new to Wilson’s well-documented  and extreme biography, Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road is an welcome chance to spend time in the company of pop music genius. And it’s a reminder how surprisingly simple geniuses can be.

Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road. Directed by Brent Wilson, with Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Jakob Dylan Nick Jonas, Linda Perry, Don Was. The film opens at the Ted Rogers Hot Docs Cinema in person or online Dec. 10. For more information and tickets go to Hot Docs Box Office.