Review: Dreamin’ Wild

By John Corrado

★★★ (out of 4)

The title of Dreamin’ Wild, the new music drama from writer-director Bill Pohlad, comes from the name of an album first recorded by teenage brothers Donnie and Joe Emerson on their rural Washington farm in the late 1970s. The album flew under the radar, before finding unexpected success thirty years later when it was rediscovered by a record producer who reissued it.

In telling this true story, Pohlad employs a similar narrative structure to his Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy from 2014, drawing parallels between past and present by artfully shifting between younger and older versions of these characters.

In ‘present day’ circa 2011, Donnie (Casey Affleck) is struggling to keep his independent recording studio afloat, while performing at weddings on the side with his wife Nancy (Zooey Deschanel). Joe (Walton Goggins) has stayed back on the farm with their aging parents Don Sr. (Beau Bridges) and Salina (Barbara Deering).

But a visit from Matt Sullivan (Chris Messina) takes them right back to their teenage years as budding rockstars. Matt has gotten his hands on a copy of their self-recorded 1979 album Dreamin’ Wild from an antique record collector, and wants to reissue it on his label Light in the Attic. This critical reappraisal of the album forces the brothers to reconnect with their past and the fame that never came.

For a story about artists finding newfound fame for an album that was first recorded over thirty years prior, it’s fitting that the past and present are allowed to bleed so freely into each other in Pohlad’s film. In flashbacks, Donnie and Joe are teenagers (played by Noah Jupe and Jack Dylan Grazer, respectively) plugging away at recording the album in a studio built by their dad, with the prodigiously talented Donnie micromanaging the production, and Joe backing him up on drums. Throughout, we start to realize why the brothers never found further success.

While Dreamin’ Wild follows some of the usual biopic beats, Pohlad is aiming at something smaller and more intimate; at heart, this is a stripped down story about coming to terms with unrealized potential, underlying sibling rivalries, and how moments from the past continue to impact the present. There is a sort of faded poignancy baked into the storytelling here that can’t be denied, as Pohlad aims to do for overlooked musician Donnie Emerson what Ethan Hawke’s similarly poetic music biopic Blaze did for Blaze Foley.

The centrepiece of Dreamin’ Wild is Affleck, whose rugged demeanour allows him to convey a character mournfully coming to terms with a career that never was, as he is forced to reexamine his past. Affleck is matched by a soulful turn from Bridges as the father who sacrificed everything for his sons, and the quietly impactful work of Goggins as the brother who grew up in the shadow of his more naturally gifted older sibling. It’s in a pair of later scenes between Affleck and Bridges and Affleck and Goggins that the film finds its emotional centre, with Pohlad crafting a touching music biopic that resonates thanks to these rich performances.