Love & Mercy
Roadside Attractions | Release Date: June 5, 2015 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
80
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 40 Critic Reviews
Positive:
36
Mixed:
3
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleJun 4, 2015
Love & Mercy captures with striking immediacy the unbound power of the artist in his element. Read full review
100
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsJun 4, 2015
It's the best musical biopic in decades. Read full review
100
Washington PostAnn HornadayJun 4, 2015
It’s difficult to make a visually dynamic movie about people listening. But that’s precisely what Pohlad has done with both sensitivity and audaciousness, on the one hand attuning his protagonist to the music of the spheres, and on the other bearing witness to his deepest isolation and sadness. Read full review
100
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallJun 3, 2015
It's a remarkable movie, the first of 2015 that I can't wait to see and hear again. Read full review
100
Village VoiceStephanie ZacharekJun 2, 2015
The beauty, and the horror, of Bill Pohlad's exhilarating and inventive Love & Mercy...is the sense it gives us of the world passing through Brian Wilson's ears. Read full review
100
HitfixDrew McWeenySep 13, 2014
In essence, we get to study Brian's break with sanity and his eventual healing, but by keeping the focus tight on these two moments, the film becomes emotionally exhilarating. Read full review
90
SalonAndrew O'HehirJun 5, 2015
In telling the story of one damaged suburban genius and his unlikely rebirth, Love & Mercy captures the vanished possibilities of 1960s pop music, the fecklessness of the California dream and its decay into tragedy and madness, and other things less easy to describe or define. Read full review
90
The New York TimesA.O. ScottJun 4, 2015
Love & Mercy doesn’t claim to solve the mystery of Brian Wilson, but it succeeds beyond all expectation in making you hear where he was coming from. Read full review
90
VarietyAndrew BarkerSep 13, 2014
A wonderfully innervating cure for the common musical biopic, Bill Pohlad’s Love & Mercy vibrantly illuminates two major breakthroughs — one artistic, one personal — in the life of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleWilliam GossJun 3, 2015
Ultimately, all involved are cast in the shadow of Dano’s wide-ranging performance, capturing Wilson at his most ecstatic and his most hopeless. Already a well-established talent with remarkable turns in "There Will Be Blood" and "Little Miss Sunshine," the young actor has never demonstrated such profound sensitivity as he does here. Some might even say he’s been touched by greatness, or at least does a damn good impression of it. Read full review
88
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaJun 5, 2015
Its daring dive into the mind of Brian Wilson feels right. God only knows (to borrow a Pet Sound song title or two), but you still believe in . . . Brian. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperJun 4, 2015
Rarely have two actors been so effective playing the same character while taking totally different approaches. Read full review
88
St. Louis Post-DispatchJoe WilliamsJun 4, 2015
Love & Mercy is artfully but unobtrusively directed by Bill Pohlad. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter TraversJun 4, 2015
Musically, the film is a miracle, right and riveting in every detail. Read full review
88
Miami HeraldHoward CohenJun 4, 2015
Love & Mercy allows you to understand how the lifelong auditory hallucination that haunted Wilson also fueled his creativity. Sometimes, from madness, great art can emerge. Read full review
88
New York PostLou LumenickJun 3, 2015
Worth seeing just for the dramatization of the making of “Good Vibrations” alone. But there’s much more to savor in this biopic — a rare high note in the drone of so much summer dreck. Read full review
83
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerJun 5, 2015
Dano and Cusack never let us forget that Wilson is human before he is anything else – genius, icon, legend. The film provides him with the succor that was so lacking in so many aspects of his life. I would like to think that the real Brian Wilson, looking at this film, would be OK with it. Read full review
83
IndieWireEric KohnSep 13, 2014
Love & Mercy is an engrossing portrait of Wilson's specific artistic inclinations, which draw from no real precedent. Read full review
83
The PlaylistKevin JagernauthSep 13, 2014
Love & Mercy isn't a standard celebration nor a traditional music biopic. Instead, it's a survival story. Read full review
80
CineVueJamie NeishJul 9, 2015
An unconventional biopic that's masterfully executed and fascinating to watch. Read full review
80
Total FilmKevin HarleyJul 6, 2015
Don’t worry, baby: Pohlad’s biopic is reverent, duly, but also rich, clever, warm and sensitive. Banks and Giamatti provide anchor, Cusack impresses and Dano surfs to glory. Read full review
80
EmpireIan FreerJul 6, 2015
This is the film Brian Wilson’s talent deserves: original, smart and affecting. Read full review
80
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierJun 6, 2015
To capture the artistic process in this way is extraordinary, and in many ways unprecedented. The scenes are not shot in documentary style, but flow with bits of inspiration, conflict and nuance. We see and listen to some of the era’s greatest songs being made. Read full review
80
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinJun 5, 2015
Director Bill Pohlad (working with frequent Wes Anderson cinematographer Robert Yeoman) is extraordinarily sensitive to the amorphous nature of Wilson’s life and art, and Atticus Ross’s score creates a floating, evocative soundscape, which is Brian Wilson–esque without a trace of plagiarism. Read full review
80
Time OutJoshua RothkopfJun 2, 2015
Wilson, a pop savant, was chasing some kind of dragon, and as the movie toggles years forward to the scared, overmedicated Wilson of the 1980s (John Cusack, absorbingly strange in the tougher part), you sense that the dragon bit back. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawSep 13, 2014
It’s creative and experimental in just the right spirit, though with an asymmetric flaw. The film is a kind of diptych in which one of the panels is more fully achieved than the other. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterJohn DeForeSep 13, 2014
A deeply satisfying pop biopic whose subject's bifurcated creative life lends itself to an unconventional structure. Read full review
75
Portland OregonianJeff BakerJun 5, 2015
It's a welcome change from a conventional birth-to-now biography, somewhere between the straight narratives of "Ray" and "Get On Up" and the fractured, Cate Blanchett-in-sunglasses, Richard Gere-on-horseback meta-fable "I'm Not There." Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comGlenn KennyJun 5, 2015
The result is a story that’s hair-raisingly watchable and frequently moving, regardless of what you believe you might already know of Wilson’s life. Read full review
75
TheWrapInkoo KangJun 4, 2015
Like Wilson’s cornball “California Girls,” Love & Mercy is by no means a complicated portrait, and yet it’s a curiously satisfying one. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeTy BurrJun 4, 2015
Despite the lumps in the batter, Love & Mercy ends up involving and affecting, because the performances are honest and the stories it tells are inherently dramatic. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubErik AdamsJun 3, 2015
Capturing the spirit of that music (while dramatizing the circumstances of its creation) is Love & Mercy’s biggest victory. Read full review
75
Movie NationRoger MooreJun 2, 2015
John Cusack plays this older, post-breakdown Wilson, a twitchy, tentative millionaire genius who has the guilelessness and sweetness of an abused puppy. Read full review
70
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzJun 4, 2015
A great movie exists in Love & Mercy, side by side with a pretty good one. Read full review
70
The DissolveKeith PhippsJun 2, 2015
An earnest attempt to convey the essential truth of Wilson’s extraordinary career and difficult life animates both halves of the film, and both performances. Read full review
70
The New YorkerAnthony LaneJun 1, 2015
You feel both moved and exhausted by the distance that Wilson has to travel, musically and emotionally, before reaching the shore. That makes it, I guess, a happy ending. But then, as one of the Beach Boys remarks, on listening to “Pet Sounds,” even the happy songs are sad. Read full review
60
The TelegraphTim RobeyJul 9, 2015
Pohlad’s film is good at probing the line between radical creativity and mental disarray; arguably less good at getting Wilson back on the safe side of it. But it leaves you in no doubt that the man’s a genius. Read full review
50
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranJun 4, 2015
Pohlad did not lack for ideas about how he wanted to portray Brian Wilson's life, but he is without the wherewithal to effectively put them into practice. Read full review
50
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternJun 4, 2015
Both Mr. Dano and Mr. Cusack, by contrast, find as many notes as they can in portraying their troubled character, though they’re clearly limited by the schematic writing and insistent direction. Read full review
38
Slant MagazineChristopher GrayJun 1, 2015
Bill Pohlad seems never to have met a metaphor he couldn't bludgeon into its most rudimentary and literal interpretation. Read full review
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