John Cusack has made some interesting choices in the past decade of his career. For every Maps To The Stars boosting him up, there's a Dragon Blade to take him down, and a project like Cell that plants him firmly in the middle of the Hollywood star system. Not content to sit on his laurels, Cusack has another film coming our way, and pretty soon too. Watch the trailer for the Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy below, and see where you think this film hits on the Cusack Scale.
Many thanks to the film’s official YouTube channel, the trailer for Love & Mercy has been shared for all to see, and it looks like it has a fair amount of promise. Co-starring Paul Dano as the younger incarnation of the rock idol who helped make The Beach Boys what they were best known for, Love & Mercy tells the story of both Brian Wilson's mental deterioration during the recording of Pet Sounds, as well as his 1982 battle against his therapist/collaborator (Paul Giamatti) with the help of a Cadillac saleswoman (Elizabeth Banks) he'd recently met. Both narratives will flow into each other, and from the looks of this trailer, that might be the first issue the film has to overcome.
While Dano and Cusack are excellent performers on their own, it's the fact that they'll have to be playing off of each other's unique styles that makes you wonder how well this rather thin trailer for Love & Mercy is really selling the film. Clocking in at only a little over a minute, the trailer breezes through its subject with the informational content of a commercial more than a full-fledged trailer, and considering this film's coming out at the beginning of June, it's not hard to see how this film could be very easily buried in the summer 2015 crush.
However, when all four actors advertised in Love & Mercy are on their top form, a film could really shine. Not to mention, if this film was actually a gem waiting to be discovered, it wouldn't be the first time that a legitimately good movie would be buried by horrible marketing skills. The words John Carter still send chills down Disney executive's spines. While this trailer is a short glimpse into a story that's as complex as it is legendary, it doesn't necessarily spell "instant disaster." Not to mention, the Love & Mercy trailer does manage to nail the one thing that any Beach Boys biopic needs to remember to honor: the legendary music.
Love & Mercy hits theaters on June 5th.
