Joey Magidson
For being hugely influential, I’m not sure that The Beach Boys get all the credit they deserve. An album like Pet Sounds is rightly considered one of the ten or twelve best ever made. The band had controversy, highs, lows, and everything else, so a documentary was only a matter of time. Here we have The Beach Boys, a production coming to Disney+, that actually focuses in on what made them great, alongside how they did it. I’ve always liked the group while never thinking a ton about them, but there’s a newfound appreciation to be found here.
The Beach Boys is a documentary that fans will be very into. Whereas other works might care about the issues of the band, and movies like Love & Mercy have made that a focus, or their infamous run-in with Charles Manson, this is about the music. If you’re curious about how Pet Sounds was crafted, for example, you’re in for a treat.
The documentary looks at, you guessed it, the legendary band The Beach Boys. We start with the humble family beginnings of the group, where siblings Brian Wilson, Dennis Wilson, and Carl Wilson, their cousin Mike Love, as well as their friend Al Jardine, started what would become the California Dream sound. The focus is largely on how they did what they did, the genius of Brian, as well as watching the music come together. While we see glimpses of some of the notable controversies, this is a more celebratory doc, one mostly about the process of making classic music.
The hook here is the never-before-seen footage of the group recording, as well as new interviews with band members new and old Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, Blondie Chaplin, Bruce Johnston, and David Marks. Some of the talking heads include Lindsey Buckingham and Janelle Monae, while Carl Wilson and Dennis Wilson get to speak in their own words. For many this will be the most that you’ll head from The Beach Boys about actually being in the band and making the music.
Directors Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny are veterans of musical documentaries, so they very much know how the sausage is made here. The former has a foot in narrative cinema as well, but resists the urge to find the drama of Brian Wilson as the sole focus. The latter has looked at the careers of folks like Bruce Springsteen and Sylvester Stallone, so The Beach Boys do fit right in. Together, they look at a lot of what fans are curious about, as opposed to drama seekers.
The Beach Boys will work best on lovers of the band, but anyone can certainly enjoy the music and process depicted here. Is it a great doc? No, but it’s very good one, with an original focus on how the California Dream sound came to be. Give it a shot now on Disney+ and you’ll have a newfound appreciation for their genius.
SCORE: ★★★
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