Celebrate Pet Sounds’ 60th with a DIY Beach Boys Film Fest

May 16 brings the 60th anniversary of The Beach Boys’ crowning achievement, Pet Sounds, and an ideal opportunity to luxuriate in the band’s bountiful but complicated legacy. Stacked high with elegant earworms like “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” and “Sloop John B.,” Pet Sounds pushed Brian Wilson and company past surf rock and showed that pop could command a place in the realm of high art. The album, though, is still just a single chapter in a story that started in 1961 and continues to this day with the band’s current iteration.

In more than one way, The Beach Boys are the ultimate American story. Besides their status as poster boys for what’s arguably the most overtly all-American aesthetic in rock ‘n’ roll history, the band members themselves stand as undeniable representatives of that tattered old warhorse, the American Dream. They were a bunch of middle-class kids from the unremarkable L.A. suburb Hawthorne, who foisted their vision on the world and wound up creating something far bigger than themselves.

But theirs is also a uniquely American story in a David Lynch kind of way. Lurking just below the squeaky-clean surface of their sun-dappled mythology there flows an ocean of dysfunction involving drugs, alcohol, mental illness, physical and psychological abuse, dirty business dealings, internecine friction, legal battles, and more.

Some percentage of all the above appears in each portion of The Beach Boys filmography — the biopics, documentary features, and miniseries that tell different parts of the tale in very different ways from each other, and with wildly varying degrees of success. But from the powerfully poignant to the gloriously cheesy, all of the Beach Boys film fare represented here has one thing in common — in one fashion or another, it’s all eminently entertaining. So, if you’re up for celebrating Pet Sounds’ 60th birthday this week by building your own Beach Boys film fest, queue up these sunbaked selections. All of them can be currently streamed from one source or another, even if you need to go YouTubing for a couple of them.

Summer Dreams: The Story of the Beach Boys (1990)

The first Beach Boys biopic was essentially a stealth Dennis Wilson biopic, reportedly based on the Dennis-centric book Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. It tells the story of the band’s first quarter-century from the drummer’s POV, which is an interestingly novel turn. Bruce Greenwood, who went on to become a well respected actor, handles his role as Dennis well, as does Greg Kean as Brian, but you have to suspend enough disbelief to accept guys in their 30s playing teenagers.

Summer Dreams digs into Wilson paterfamilias Murry’s reign of terror and Brian’s psychological struggles but was made before the world at large was aware of the conflicts with Brian’s second bully: notoriously controlling therapist Eugene Landy. This made-for-TV movie plays fast and loose with some significant facts, like the very existence of singer/guitarist David Marks, who occupied Al Jardine’s role for a couple of the band’s crucial early years but is totally unrepresented here. The screenplay gets laughably expository in spots, and the inevitable Charlie Manson appearance borders on parody, but overall, Summer Dreams is Palme d’Or-worthy compared to the next biopic.

Brian Wilson: I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times (1995)

Short (66 minutes) but sweet, this Don Was-directed documentary based around new interviews with Brian is a celebration of Wilson’s personal and musical rebirth after he escaped the clutches of Dr. Landy and married his second wife, Melinda. Both developments were crucial to his rebound from the depths of depression and other issues, though the former struggle is afforded only the briefest of mentions. Interviews with family and friends fill out the portrait of the tortured genius. In an illustration of how a young Brian first explored vocal harmony at home with brother Carl and their mother, contemporary footage of the three singing “In My Room” together has major teardrop potential. The doc also helped spread the gospel in the period when much of the world — especially the portion of the populace born post-Pet Sounds — was awakening to the full glory of The Beach Boys’ work.

The Beach Boys: An American Family (2000)

It’s tempting to ponder the genesis of this two-part ABC TV miniseries. Maybe someone at ABC said, “We didn’t fuck up our last Beach Boys biopic badly enough 10 years ago, let’s have another crack at it.” The cartoon histrionics of the epically miscast Fred Weller in the role of Brian Wilson aren’t the only problem, but they sure don’t help matters. By the second episode, Weller’s attempts at embodying Wilson’s psychological turmoil bring to mind nothing so much as Joe Flaherty or Eugene Levy comedically chewing scenery in a satirical SCTV sketch. The screenplay is no bargain either, visiting most of the same events as Summer Dreams in a far more ham-fisted way. Even Brian himself was unequivocal in his lambasting of American Family, saying, “I thought it was in poor taste…. I thought it stunk.” So why bother including it here? Because its very failures are what make it the most entertaining. It’s the ne plus ultra of cheesy celebrity biopics. Pull on up and bring the popcorn.

Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson & The Story of Smile (2004)

Made by Brian and Melinda’s production company, Beautiful Dreamer documents the 38-year journey of Brian’s boldest, most elusive vision: the Smile album. For decades, hardcore Beach Boys fans eagerly absorbed bootlegs of bits and pieces from Wilson’s long-unreleased art-pop suite. Too avant-garde for Capitol Records and the rest of the band, it created a rift between Brian and the other Beach Boys that’s credited with contributing to his psychological downfall. Directed by David Leaf, who has written extensively about the band and is regarded among the cognoscenti as one who “gets” them, Beautiful Dreamer covers the ’60s portion of the story and the emotionally charged 2000s revival. Buoyed by Melinda, friends, and colleagues, the revitalized but still fragile Brian revisits the scarring Smile experience in order to finally finish, perform, and record the piece. When the naked fear Wilson exudes during the process is replaced by joyous triumph at the end, the catharsis is downright inspiring.

Love & Mercy (2015)

At its core, Love & Mercy is a love story, but it visits some dark, terrifying places along the way. Directed by 12 Years a Slave producer Bill Pohlad, it was nominated for two Golden Globes. While the bar is admittedly low, it’s far and away the best Beach Boys-related biopic. Jon Cusack plays 1980s Brian Wilson, while Paul Dano is ’60s Brian. Past and present alternate to show how Wilson first got so screwed up and where he wound up decades later. Paul Giamatti is positively scary as Brian’s manipulative therapist, Eugene Landy, and Cusack perfectly captures the mix of innocence, inspiration, and psychological damage that informed the way Wilson interacted with the world. Elizabeth Banks is on point as Melinda, who helped deliver Brian from Landy’s clutches and nurture him back to health and musical activity. Even if you don’t give a toss about The Beach Boys, it works on a strictly dramatic level, but for devotees it’ll bear exponentially greater resonance.

Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road (2021)

If Love & Mercy is a love story, then Long Promised Road is about friendship. Over time, the relationship between Brian and journalist Jason Fine grew from a professional acquaintance based around interviews to a personal bond built on a deeper emotional understanding. Much of the documentary revolves around Fine functioning as Wilson’s wing-man and revisiting significant sites from Brian’s past. Ultimately, it’s a sweet, poignant snapshot of Wilson’s final act. With Fine as our intermediary, we get a real sense of what Wilson was like in day-to-day life during his later years. It’s peppered with unnecessary celebrity testimonials about Brian’s genius — let’s just say you probably don’t need Nick Jonas and the dude from Barenaked Ladies to tell you how great The Beach Boys are. But as both a document of a special relationship and an intimate view of an artistic giant, it’s a keeper.

The Beach Boys (2024)

The most recent entry in our filmography, this Disney-produced doc packs a lot into just under two hours. It covers all the bases, and if you just want a comprehensive, straight-across-the-board presentation of The Beach Boys’ saga, this is probably your best bet. No film can be all things to all people, and a lot of what’s here may be treading familiar territory for obsessives, but there’s still enough freshness to make this a fun trip for all levels of admirers. And with Brian passing a little more than a year after its release, it could be considered the last word on America’s band.