They treat Smile as a slightly misguided project that failed due to Brian succumbing to a sort of general listlessness, and then big up Smiley Smile as the real quirky experimental one (they go “we had a song about vegetables! You might think we were crazy but we did it anyway!!”, as if that wasn’t already a Smile song), and make zero mention of Brian’s comeback and the fact he managed to finish Smile years later, and how there was the popular Sessions box set and so on.

As per Mike Love in this doc, Mike Love not getting his due respect and appreciation is a major problem in the history of the Beach Boys.

I’m glad they did at least pay lip service to the run of late 60s, early 70’s records.

The modern interviews with Brian are pretty sad, just from how little they were able to get out of him. They show him sitting down in a studio for an interview, about half a fragment of one answer makes it into the documentary, and that’s it. And the reunion on the beach at the end he looks fully zombified. The poor guy is basically gone at this point I suspect.

I’m also pretty sure a lot of interview snippets used AI generated audio, they often sounded off, and not really like the people they were supposed to be.