Dreamin’ Wild (2022 | USA | 110 min. | Bill Pohlad)
Like Bill Pohlad’s Brian Wilson biopic, Love & Mercy, his retelling of what happened when vinyl collectors (and later, Seattle record label Light in the Attic) rediscovered Donnie and Joe Emerson’s 1979 album, Dreamin’ Wild is split over two time periods. Opening in the late twenty-aughties, Donnie (played by a grizzled and time-worn Casey Affleck) is consumed by raising his two kids and trying to keep his Spokane recording studio above water. Between ferrying the kids to school and occasionally performing in a successful small-time cover band with his wife (Zooey Deschanel, left without much do here) at events around town, he’s settled into a pretty solid if unexciting life.
Still, his face and persona are tinged with a vague sense of disappointment that seem a little more tender than the usual pains of settling into middle age. When a surprise call brings him back to his family’s farm in Fruitland, Washington, we learn that his lingering malaise may be a callus that’s still nursing wounds from a once skyrocketing young music career that’s been long since stifled.
Decades have passed, but the rolling fields of the farm and the golden evening light conjure a place frozen in time. When Donnie arrives to heed a surprise call from his old record label, he and the entire sheltered family are seemingly shocked to learn about the very existence of the internet, let alone the improbably news that there’s growing niche online fandom for the one great record (with a cheesy cover image) that the brothers recorded as teens in a professional quality studio on the property, built for them by their ever-supportive and deeply earnest father (Beau Bridges, a delightful if straight-ahead presence).
It’s there that we meet older brother Joe (Walton Goggins), who’s long since made peace with a solitary farming life. But the prospect of a second swing at musical success stirs memories of their teenage years, and dynamic young actors Noah Jupe and Jack Dylan Grazer infuse these vibrant flashbacks with the optimism of youth and the bloom of realizing creative possibilities over secluded late night jam sessions. These segments, set in a past unburdened by social media, reflect the yearning of rural teen isolation and are gauzily rendered somewhere between dreams and memory.
As the promise of a “reunion” tour and a showcase in Seattle at the Showbox loom in the present day, one wishes for more of the kid stuff (or at least its energy) to break through the present day gloom. Nevertheless, Affleck conveys Donnie’s reticence, cracks of optimism, the self-defeating strains of perfectionism that shaped his past and have limited his present. Although the stakes are more modest than the high wire act portrayed in Love & Mercy, Pohlad evocatively transports us into the complex emotional journey that comes with the tantalizing prospect of a unexpected midlife encore. It’s a great true story that gained national attention a decade ago, all the better to see it realized on screen and filmed locally.
Modified from an earlier review of Dreamin’ Wild premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival. It will be released by Roadside Attractions on August 4 2023.