Quendrith Johnson

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent

He may not look like your typical American leading man, but actor Paul Dano, 31, is likely a next Oscar contender for Best Actor come the Academy Awards presentation next year. Dano, who celebrated a birthday this month, is indelible as a younger Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy, though this latest is just a topper among many gripping performances. If you turn back the clock 10 years to The Ballad of Jack and Rose from writer-director Rebecca Miller (yes, Arthur Miller’s daughter), Dano’s role as Thaddius was the basis for Daniel Day-Lewis hand-picking him for Paul Sunday in oil-drenched epic There Will Be Blood (2007). Dano actually played twin brothers in that film in a pitch-perfect performance that almost merits a watch-and-repeat on the clip of the bowling alley scene alone for clues on what lies ahead for him.

In Love & Mercy, that trademark Dano bone-deep appearance of instability is again the centerpiece of a shattering performance as sonic groundbreaker Brian Wilson, who with his brothers, shaped the sound of The Beach Boys. When he says “It works in my head,” as Brian Wilson Past, you get the feeling he is channeling The Beach Boy from days gone by. And it really puts the onus on John Cusack, tasked as the older Brian Wilson.

Born in New York, Paul Dano has a background as a frontman and musician which takes the portrayal of Wilson further into uncanny territory. Known for boy-band harmony, The Beach Boys had at their core, an experimental musician, which this very fine actor pulls off in a chromatic scale of behavior. Cusack gets all of the later-life trauma scenes, including reacting to the loss of Dennis Wilson. As a side note, the real Dennis Wilson, whose drowning death is mourned in the film, co-starred with James Taylor in Monte Hellman’s 1971 road classic Two Lane Blacktop. In other words, the actual Wilson brothers were a force to behold. (Dennis Wilson's body was found in 12 ft. of water in Marina del Rey in 1983, a truly tragic end for a Beach Boy.)

Love & Mercy is co-written by Brian Wilson (from the life), Michael A. Lerner, and Oren Moverman (Rampart, The Messenger). Since it draws breath from Wilson himself and these talented writers, the story is emblematic of the power of the music industry’s marketing machine to sugarcoat the often harrowing rise of mere humans behind the mask of heavily promoted flawless pop bands. Directed by producer Bill Pohland (Wild, 12 Years a Slave), this movie thus shines a spot on Dano as a raw “Brian Past,” a version that melts the sticky sweet coating right off the usual story of this home-made iconic California supergroup.

But the hallmarks of an interesting career were charted way before this latest, possibly Oscar-worthy, Dano-fueled biopic. Remember long-haired disgruntled Paul Dano in Little Miss Sunshine (2006) with Alan Arkin, Steve Carrell, Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette and an emerging Abigail Breslin (The Call)? Or look back at Dano in Looper (2012) with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, and Emily Blunt, which is supposed to take place between 2044-2074. Ironically, Looper also has an equally mismatched old and young version of a character a la Dano to Cusack in Love & Mercy. It’s not that Cusack isn’t a really inspired older Brian Wilson; it’s that Dano so owns the younger version, it’s hard to match.

“Paul Dano’s Greatest Hits” on YouTube is actually a fan-compilation of the onscreen thrashings the actor has taken over the years. Daniel Day-Lewis mauls, then murders, his character in There Will Be Blood. In Blood, Day-Lewis throttles Dano’s Paul Sunday so severely that it is almost torture to watch, especially when he literally shoves refined oil down his gullet, to a venomous lecture that few could muster except the aptly nicknamed “Greatest Living Actor” from Ireland. And a shock death by bowling pin comes later for Dano’s Sunday.

In Prisoners (2013), he receives horrific punishment at the hands of Hugh Jackman, playing a darkly drawn disturbed father of a missing child. For this underexposed film, also starring Melissa Leo, Dano encores his peak in savage scenes. 

“I actually found that doing the (bathroom brawl with Jackman) scenes was sometimes a release. But preparing for them was the scary  part… the research, the dark subject matter (child abduction),” he said for an official Sundance interview with Melissa Leo on Prisoners. “Getting ready for them was the scary part. We all wanted to make sure we got the best out of the scenes, we wanted to leave it on the floor, so to speak.” Afterwards, he explained, “you can feel good after doing it,” despite the bleak subject matter. It came down to “are we really going to explore what these people are really going through?,” and not be exploitive.

In 12 Years A Slave , Paul Dano, via the high-handed bigoted character he portrays to frightening veracity, gets reduced to a pulp by Chitwetel Ejofor’s amazingly dimensional titular lead. For 12 Years, Dano gushed early on in interviews that “Steve McQueen is a great filmmaker.” On film, the actor achieves an insane fever pitch during the beat-down, even screams in vain “You will not live to see another day,” while losing the fight. 

You could say he is acting’s ultimate Good Sport for the drubbings he has been subjected to on film; and cause-films are somewhat of a through-line for Paul Dano, thus far. He did a PETA spot as part of his participation in Fast Food Nation (2006). He opted into that film “once I saw it was Richard Linklater (Boyhood, Slackers), he is someone I like a lot. He’s made some of my favorite films ever.” 

“I tried to get a couple McDonald’s” to hire, but “believe it or not, I could not get a job.” Fast food commercial farming “is no way for these animals to live… Hopefully some people will be confronted and take a look, because it’s really unbelievable.”

While he’s had a slew of films that could be construed as misses, especially the strange big-tent bomb Cowboys & Aliens from 2011, the screen and stage actor veers toward smaller projects like Being Flynn (2012) that seem to keep him on track.

Unhomed issues take front and center in Flynn. For an interview with Manny the Movie Guy, on making the film, Dano said “you get a script in the mail, you see that Robert De Niro is involved and you say ‘Okay, I can’t wait to be in this… playing father and son with Robert De Niro.’” He also noted that, “It turns out Nick Flynn, the author, lives in my neighborhood in New York about three blocks down. So he had left a copy of the book at the bookstore for me, inscribed, the day I got the part. I had no idea how he knew already. So we started sharing some quality time together. The most important thing for me at first, was to let him know who I was… to hang out before I grilled him. I didn’t want to delve right into ‘bare your soul for me.” De Niro is the displaced father in the book, which is based on Nick Flynn’s actual father, whom he hadn’t seen in 20 years until he runs into him at a homeless shelter.

Long-time partner Zoe Kazan said in a video interview for Sundance that she wrote her script for Ruby Sparks, in which he is her onscreen love interest, with “Paul in mind from almost the beginning… I showed him a few pages” initially. Together they looked to the team from Little Miss Sunshine, and after some nine months collaborating, with Kazan rewriting, Ruby Sparks came together. “I’ve learned a lot in my relationship with Paul, we’ve been together for about five years (at the time, 2012)… The things I find challenging about (Paul) are the things that make you who you are,” she said of him. They are still together and inspiring each other as of 2015.

Daughter of writer-producer Nicholas Kazan (Mathilde, Reversal of Fortune) and screenwriter-director Robin Swicord (Memoirs of a Geisha, The Jane Austen Book Club), Zoe is also the granddaughter of On The Waterfront (Marlon Brando, 1954) director Elia Kazan, who directed other classics including Streetcar Named Desire (also Brando, 1951), and Gentlemen’s Agreement (Gregory Peck, 1947). In January, Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan, Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage, and Josh Hamliton appeared at a charity benefit in New York with a reprised staged reading of Jonathan Marc Sherman’s play “Things We Want” (director Ethan Hawke) for the 20th anniversary of The New Group at The Jewel Box Theatre on 42nd Street. So it seems all aspects of acting and advocacy converge in Paul Dano. And when the Oscar nominations for 2015 are announced, you can bet Dano as “Brian Wilson Past” in Love & Mercy gets some serious love. Or mercy.

Released on June 5, Love & Mercy is directed by Bill Pohland, and stars John Cusack as Brian Wilson Current, Paul Dano as Brian Wilson Past, Elizabeth Banks (Hunger Games) - now successful director of Pitch Perfect 2 - and Paul Giamatti (Ides of March, Sideways) as Wilson’s sadistic and formidable shrink. Don’t miss a chance to catch the wave Paul Dano makes in this movie.

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