Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Beach Boys’ on Disney+, A Reverent Look Back At A Band Whose “Good Vibrations” Just Couldn’t Last

The Beach Boys, now streaming on Disney+ and co-directed Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny, takes a straightforward approach to telling the band’s story. With a classic lineup that consisted of three brothers, a cousin, and a close neighborhood friend, a sense of family informed the Beach Boys right from their early 1960s start, when “Surfin Safari” made Americans swoon over the mystique of a California lifestyle. But family bonds can make things tough, too, and The Beach Boys also highlights the confrontations between the brothers and their father-manager, Murray Wilson. The doc features the perspectives of Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson in old interviews, includes new interviews with Mike Love and Al Jardine and context and commentary from friends and collaborators, and appearances by Lindsey Buckingham, Janelle Monae, Ryan Tedder, and Don Was.   

THE BEACH BOYS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: “Surfin Safari,” “Surfin U.S.A.,” “Surfer Girl,” “Fun Fun Fun” – are you recognizing a pattern? In 1962 and ‘63, before the British Invasion and the social tumult of the decade’s later years, the Beach Boys were charting surfy, sunny singles full of catching waves, flirting with girls, and racing T-Birds and Deuce Coupes out on the strip. They were signed to Capitol Records before anybody in the band was even 21. And they were transmitting a total vibe to American teens and the world at large. Back then, cultural historian and music critic Josh Kun says in The Beach Boys, the band were “participating in the creation of a California dream.”

It started in the backseat of the family truckster. That’s where Brian Wilson and his younger brothers Dennis and Carl honed their mastery of three-part harmony. And with the addition of family friend Al Jardine, they were suddenly a band. But early on, Brian also displayed a propensity for songwriting and arranging that became undeniable. (It would not be too long before his name would come with the “genius” tag.) “With Brian’s wonderful ability to write melodies and Mike’s very clever way of writing lyrics,” Jardine says, “we found a perfect formula.” But touring and the road and being on stage in front of thousands of people – that was increasingly not Brian Wilson’s jam. “The Beach Boys effectively became two groups,” Love says. “The recording group, and the touring group.” 

The rise of the Beatles gave the Beach Boys a run for their money, and a rivalry of sorts began, with Brian Wilson and the band’s 1966 creative opus Pet Sounds wowing Lennon and McCartney. (In an old piece of tape, McCartney calls it the “album of all time.”) But times were changing outside the record business, too, with the rise of the counterculture and campaigns for civil rights and social justice transforming American society, and internal divisions were fragmenting the band’s’ existence. When your father who’s also your business partner cruelly meddles in the recording process, belittles your professional abilities, and then sells the publishing rights to your lucrative music catalog without telling you, yeah, there are going to be some problems. The Beach Boys offers a bit of interpersonal reconciliation for a band who’ve been around in one form or another for over 60 years. But it’s mostly a doc that looks back with care and sensitivity on a time when the music created between brothers and friends was all about simplicity, and none of the ensuing drama.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? In 1995, musician and producer Don Was wrote, directed, and produced I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times, a biographical film about Brian Wilson, and Wilson’s participation in the project also spawned an accompanying soundtrack album that featured new versions of his old songs. But the tail continues to grow. Filmmaker Bill Pohlad, whose 2014 Beach Boys biopic Love and Mercy is well worth your time, cast John Cusack as Brian Wilson using the footage from Made for These Times as a guide to his mannerisms. (The cast for Love and Mercy is actually stacked all around, with Elizabeth Banks, Paul Giamatti, Bill Camp, plus Paul Dano as a younger version of Wilson.)   

Performance Worth Watching: Al Jardine is a good interview in The Beach Boys. He was there at the beginning, and weathered good times and bad with the band. But perhaps because he wasn’t a Wilson brother – or a son of Murry – Jardine’s point of view on the Beach Boys saga is as a resigned observer. His interviews are a mix of allowances for how they might have handled things better, but also nostalgia for how good of a time it really was, being on top of the pop charts and the world.

Memorable Dialogue: Janelle Monae says that when she first heard “God Only Knows,” she cried over its beauty. “When we listen to something like Pet Sounds now,” Don Was says, “and the orchestration on that, people go, ‘Yeah, cool.’ What they forget is, he did it first. Brian [Wilson] put together textures that no one had ever put into popular songs before.” 

Sex and Skin: None. For as much as their early material dwelled on young love and fleeting summer romances, it was often pretty chaste, in keeping with the Beach Boys’ clean cut look and the style of popular movies at the time, such as Beach Blanket Bingo. And later, with his work on Pet Sounds, it wasn’t exactly wild passion and reckless abandon that Brian Wilson was exploring, but rather the twinges of romantic melancholy.  

Our Take: While the new interviews in The Beach Boys with Jardine and Mike Love are mostly insightful, and refreshingly not another rehash of the acrimony and litigation that clogged the band’s storyline in the years following their heyday – and thankfully, nor with any mention of “Kokomo,” their 1988 novelty hit from the soundtrack to Cocktail – it’s the vintage look-ins on Beach Boys activity that really shines here, as the baby faced boys ham it up in old record company promotional footage or play their songs on American Bandstand. A 1960s tour of Japan is captured in washed-out 16mm color, Brian Wilson is seen captaining his Pet Sounds recording sessions with legendary studio band The Wrecking Crew, and in one incredible moment, the weird power of the 1966 smash “Good Vibrations” is illustrated with a close-up of its wiggy and strange and bold theremin part being played right there in the studio. Even drummer Hal Blaine and guitarist Carol Kaye, stone cold Wrecking Crew pros, couldn’t believe that Brian Wilson was gonna put an instrument with no strings and built around an oscillating frequency on a pop record. But they were happy to match his freak. And that’s a cooler angle for The Beach Boys to take – reveling in the unpredictability of Brian Wilson’s creative spirit – than wallowing in the lawsuits and Beach Boy bickering that came later.

Our Call: STREAM IT. It’s not exactly hard-hitting. But The Beach Boys dutifully fills out the arc of the band’s six-decade career, with a welcome and pointed emphasis on the beauty and simplicity of the songs they made together, back when the good vibrations were all that mattered. 

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.