There have been some good, rich, and deep ones, like “Brian Wilson: I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” the 1995 musicological meditation directed by record producer Don Was, or “Brian Wilson and the Story of ‘SMiLE’,” which chronicled the history of that most fabled of all unfinished albums as well as the remarkable story of how, in 2004, Wilson and Darian Sahanaja put its majesty back together again.
The two began to hang out and became friends, and in “Long Promised Road” they cruise around L.A., talking and listening to Brian’s music and stopping at key locales: Paradise Cove, the home of “Surfin’ Safari”; the site of Wilson’s now-demolished childhood home in Hawthorne; the houses he lived in during the ’60s and ’70s; the home of his late brother Carl; and the Beverly Glen Deli, where the two chat over Cobb salads and ice-cream sundaes.
The joyfulness of an emotional life.” So yes, maybe we don’t need another documentary about Brian Wilson, but even if you think you know it all, “Long Promised Road” is an affectionate and satisfying movie, sentimental at times but often stirringly insightful, a collection of pinpoint testimonials to Wilson’s artistry by such authoritative fans as Springsteen and Elton John, and a movie that lets the enchanting qualities of Wilson’s music cascade over you.
I never learned how to surf.” Okay, thanks for sharing! When Fine asks him what he now thinks about the mid-’60s implosion of “SMiLE” and why he felt like he had to shelve it, Brian says, “We thought it was a little ahead of its time.
Jason Fine is the easygoing friend who inquires about stuff, fields Brian’s one-sentence answers, never pushes too hard, absorbs Brian’s thoughts and feelings with sympathetic understanding, and talks music with him.
In the clips we see of the Beach Boys, and there some great ones, when we watch Brian singing, trying to play the part of a happy pop star along with his two brothers and Al Jardine and Mike Love, the truth is that there’s something off about him, and always was.
Yet part of what’s haunting about his story is that the Brian Wilson who heard voices in his head is also the Brian Wilson who heard the most gorgeous four-minute pop symphonies in his head; and those two things cannot be separated.
At one point, Don Was sits in the studio, separating out the tracks of “God Only Knows” the way they used to do on episodes of VH1’s “Classic Albums.” He gets to the part at the end where Brian layers Carl Wilson singing “God only knows what I’d be without you” into a kind of contrapuntal acid-head loop, and it’s even more amazing to hear with the instruments stripped away.
But if you listen to the hours of outtakes that were part of the box-set reissue of “SMiLE” released in 2011, you hear Wilson rehearsing the other Beach Boys with a martinet discipline that makes him sound like a fusion of Phil Spector, Stanley Kubrick, and Johann Sebastian Bach.
When you listen to him perform “Caroline No,” his singing back on the album sounds more than ever like a dream, but his singing here tells a different story: that he still feels this song, and can still channel it, the way he channeled the cosmic winds that allowed him to write it.