Paul Dano for Oscar.
Paul Dano was fantastic. He physically changed to become Brian Wilson.
He deserves an Oscar for the his work in this film.
I wished they'd just aged him up to play the older Wilson. Flipping back and forth between Dano and Cusak ruined the movie for me.
shareIt was a bit of an avant-garde way of telling a biography. It didn't take me out of the movie. The artistic purpose of having two actors was to illustrate how much the illness and abuse physically changed him.
shareThat was a cinematic device. The idea is that Wilson is not the same guy now that he was then, leaving viewers to want to know what happened.
The director accomplished this by having Wilson literally be a different guy in the flashbacks. Not every viewer likes this device, but it could have been worse. In some films, they don't even try to make the two performances gibe, as if your older self is literally a complete stranger to your younger self. I admit that those movies lose me, too. (Not my experience of growing up; doesn't seem realistic.)
But in this case, the two actors weren't completely dissimilar, and their performances were very compatible. Since both concentrated on incarnating Wilson - one from archival footage, the other from current sources - and Wilson is in fact one guy, it worked for me.
Good perspective! It's hard to pull off what they did, but it worked.
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