Disney's Beach Boys Documentary Wades Into the Rocky Surf — But Not Too Deep

It makes sense for Disney+ to debut a new feature-length documentary about the Beach Boys — titled The Beach Boys — on Memorial Day weekend. For most of the band’s career, they’ve been associated with the summer. Their first hits, in the early 1960s, were all about sand, surfing, and California car culture. Their 1974 greatest hits collection Endless Summer became a huge success for the Beach Boys at a time when their more experimental albums weren’t selling. In the decades that followed, they leaned into giving casual fans what they wanted, performing their simplest, catchiest, and most sun-splashed songs at big outdoor shows.

On the other hand, there is also some irony to Disney pushing the summer angle with The Beach Boys. The group’s resident genius, Brian Wilson, was a troubled soul; and while working through his mental illness, he tended to balance the sun with a little shadow. Brian found the touring life difficult and had very little association with the version of the band that rode the Endless Summer wave through year after year of summer concerts… even though they still mostly sang his songs. “The Beach Boys” as a public entity post-1974 — the “summer” side of the band — were generally shallower and less artful.

The Beach Boys tries to reconcile this contradiction. The co-directors Frank Marshall (a producer of Hollywood blockbusters who also directed the excellent Bee Gees doc How Can You Mend a Broken Heart? a few years ago) and Thom Zimny (who has made a lot of rock documentaries, mostly with Bruce Springsteen) begin with the premise that every member of the Beach Boys mattered, beyond Brian. They make an honest effort to understand and honor one of the most influential musicians in pop history and his more commercial-minded bandmates.

Marshall and Zimny hold to a fairly conventional structure, relying heavily on archival footage stitched together with new interviews. Most of the surviving Beach Boys weigh in (although Brian Wilson, who was diagnosed with dementia, is mostly seen and heard in old clips). The film also has the usual succession of celebrity testimonials, from the likes of Lindsey Buckingham, Don Was, Janelle Monáe and Ryan Tedder. Monáe establishes the doc’s theme early on, saying that what she takes from the Beach Boys story is that amazing music is possible “when everybody understands the part they have to play.” 

The Beach Boys covers the major points of the band’s saga, mostly familiar to anyone who knows the history of 1960s rock and pop. The movie starts with Brian Wilson and his teenage brothers Carl and Dennis forming a band in 1961 with their older cousin Mike Love. The group cashed in on the surfing craze with a series of songs promoted heavily by their aggressive manager, the Wilsons’ father Murry. 

Though they could’ve easily been a short-lived novelty act, the Beach Boys remained popular well into the mid-'60s, thanks largely to Brian’s increasingly sophisticated arrangements and his burning desire to make better records than the Beatles. His ambition and talent fused spectacularly on the 1966 album Pet Sounds and the single “Good Vibrations,” which followed that same year. But changing public tastes, internal strife, and some calamitous financial decisions soon dragged the band down, before the release of Endless Summer sparked a revival.

Marshall and Zimny do a good job of capturing how deep the roots of the Beach Boys’ troubles ran. Although Murry’s drive had a lot to do with the act’s initial success, he was an abusive bully who mocked Brian’s artsy inclinations and eventually sold the most valuable chunk of the band’s legacy — their publishing rights — for a meager return. Brian, meanwhile, was reclusive and fussy even when the Beach Boys were at their sales peak; and he became even more erratic when the public stopped buying his masterful but odd pop opuses. The executives at their label Capitol Records weren’t much help either, regularly pushing their older stuff at the expense of Brian’s more adventurous songs.

Where The Beach Boys differs from most other versions of the band’s biography is how much love the filmmakers give to Love, a man often accused by fans of chasing paydays by sidelining (and at one point suing) Brian… and by letting the Beach Boys become the poster boys for a kind of reactionary, frozen-in-time worldview.

Marshall and Zimny make the case somewhat persuasively that Love had no choice but to cash in however he could after Murry took away a vital revenue stream — and after Brian’s tortured journey into the weird made the band so unpopular that they were stuck playing half-full concert halls for $5000 a night. The movie also suggests that Love has never gotten enough credit for his lyrics on the Beach Boys hits — especially “Good Vibrations,” which grounds Brian’s orchestral esoterica in a direct, uplifting expression of positivity.

Still, for Beach Boys devotees especially, it’s hard not to feel like The Beach Boys should’ve maybe been a two-part, three-hour doc instead of a single film that runs just under two hours. The post-Pet Sounds era doesn’t really get its due; and while Marshall and Zimny do take note of the wonderful music the group made in the early ’70s when Carl and Dennis took more of the lead (with a lot of help from long-time band-members Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston and newcomers Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar), that era could’ve been given a lot more attention. Just because critics and record-buyers were largely ignoring albums like 1973’s magnificent Holland doesn’t mean they’re not worth some screen-time.

But that’s the nature of this documentary, which does its job just well enough, without ever hitting the kinds of ecstatic and surprising highs that the Beach Boys were capable of with their music. It’s thrilling, always, to hear “In My Room” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “Surf’s Up” again, and to see footage of Brian working in the studio with the top-shelf L.A. session musicians the Wrecking Crew, constructing songs one jagged piece at a time. But it’s also telling that this movie ends with on-screen titles only briefly acknowledging the deaths of Dennis (in 1983) and Carl (in 1998), before the credits roll over the sound of “Kokomo,” a frequent entry on “worst songs of all time” lists.

“Kokomo” was a hit, though, from the heart of the still-ongoing era where Mike Love is in charge. So it becomes central to The Beach Boys’ closing statement. Money wins. No judgment here.

The Beach Boys premieres May 24 on Disney+. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Noel Murray is a freelance pop culture critic and reporter living in central Arkansas.