You gotta love a biopic that shakes things up. Just like Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys innovator whose gifts as singer, songwriter and producer were based on experimentation. Instead of one actor to portray Wilson, sidelined by drugs and mental illness, director Bill Pohlad gives us two, both superb in different ways. Paul Dano, who put on pounds to further the moon-faced likeness, plays Wilson during the 1960s, at the height of his artistic creativity. John Cusack, who looks distractingly unlike Wilson, plays the shaken genius during the 1980s, when he barely emerged from the pill-induced haze created by therapist Eugene Landy . His rescuer is Cadillac saleswoman Melinda Ledbetter, who became his second wife.
