Movie Review: ‘Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road’ Tries to Understand Legend

Talking to Brian Wilson is a strange experience. You’ll never meet a more ingenuous celebrity. He’s wide open to all inquiries, but there’s a void there that neither he nor anyone else can illuminate. He’s the Rain Man of pop.

Building a documentary around recent conversations with Wilson as he drives around L.A. wasn’t likely to yield much, and doesn’t, in Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road, which is being released in theaters and via video on demand. It’s not a film that has anything fresh to offer longtime fans, who will have heard almost all of these stories before, but it does give a sense of what it might be like to hang out with Wilson today. That sense is largely . . . frustration. The man speaks like a toddler, albeit a toddler who has done a lot of LSD and coke.

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Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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Talking to Brian Wilson is a strange experience. You’ll never meet a more ingenuous celebrity. He’s wide open to all inquiries, but there’s a void there that neither he nor anyone else can illuminate. He’s the Rain Man of pop.

Building a documentary around recent conversations with Wilson as he drives around L.A. wasn’t likely to yield much, and doesn’t, in Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road, which is being released in theaters and via video on demand. It’s not a film that has anything fresh to offer longtime fans, who will have heard almost all of these stories before, but it does give a sense of what it might be like to hang out with Wilson today. That sense is largely . . . frustration. The man speaks like a toddler, albeit a toddler who has done a lot of LSD and coke.