Beautiful Dreamer Review

In 1966, Capitol Records confidently announced that the next Beach Boys album, Smile, would appear the following January. Yet this staggeringly ambitious pop symphony took more than 37 years to complete. The story behind this massively delayed record is how its guiding genius, Brian Wilson, lost his mind – plagued by imaginary voices, nagged by doubts, tortured by the hostility of his own band – and slowly got it back again. The man who once said, “Finish Smile? You might as well try to raise the Titanic,” finally did it. It’s an inspiring tale, but one to which this worthy, worshipful documentary adds very little. Unlike such gripping recent rock docs as Some Kind Of Monster, Beautiful Dreamer (the corny title says it all) is strictly for the fans.