Dreamin’ Wild – 2022
What do you remember from your teen years? What if the things you forgot are suddenly remembered by everyone else you know?
In some ways this is an ordinary story about ordinary family conflict, but at the same time it tells a true-life musical story with a very unusual trajectory. Better yet, it tells that story with a sensitivity made even more powerful by its stream-of-consciousness structure. Director Bill Pohlad cut his chops time-traveling with ease between an older and younger Brian Wilson in his film Love & Mercy.
Here he jumps time seamlessly between teenage Donnie and Joe Emerson and their middle-aged counterparts. The younger Emersons have recorded an album of songs borne out of the sheer joy of their creative impulses. Years after these songs and albums have come to rest unsold and forgotten in their parents’ basement, the middle-aged Emersons are shocked to find that their album has been discovered and now has a serious cult following.
What happened with those songs in the months after being laid onto 8-track is a story gradually revealed as we cut back and forth between the adult men and the bright-eyed teens that they once were. I think the teenage scenes, starring Noah Jupe and Jack Dylan Grazer, are some of the most unabashedly gentle scenes I have ever seen about teenagers. These boys give each other neck massages, have each other’s back, and seem to flower under the tender encouragement of a father who obviously wants to see his kids’ gifts used in the most beautiful possible way.
Jupe and Grazer inhabit these characters in a way that is simple but yet also complex because of the way we frequently have to accept that these are the same two guys we are seeing as adults in the intercut grown-up scenes. The teen scenes, I think, are really the heart of the film because they add resonance to the adult scenes. The middle-aged scenes, in fact, really only make sense in light of the things these younger actors are doing and showing us about what happened so many years before.
Casey Affleck and Walton Goggins as the adult brothers are also excellent. Affleck, as he did in Manchester by the Sea, draws us into the inner depths of his depression without showy actor moments that bait Oscar publicity. As for Goggins, he displays ordinary goodness and grace in his adult Joe. The best thing we can say about Goggins here is that, if you hadn’t seen his bio, you would wonder if he was a regular dude who showed up for the casting call. Joe, as the “less talented” of the Emerson brothers, is really defined by his ordinariness and how that quality exists in the face of his brother’s musical prodigiousness. He is a guy who just wants to have the joy of playing music with his brother, and you feel his pain when you realize his artistic limits may spell the doom of that simple hope.
(Side note…One particular Joe moment may seem to be one of the strangest moments in this film yet is also kind of delightful to me as a Christian : Joe gathers the band together in prayer before they go out and play some of the Emersons’ songs before a live audience. When he does, he prays something like, “Thank you that we can out there and praise your name.” The fact that the songs the brothers are about to play are soulful and romantic love songs may seem incongruous to the prayer, yet I love that the movie was willing to be so weird as to have one of its characters unironically lump ordinary pop love songs together with worshiping God.)
In one of the Emersons’ songs that we hear in the film, Donnie sings “Did you have a good time while it lasted?” While it lasted. This film gives us the gift of meditating alongside us on what it means for something to last. What does it mean when something lasts, yes, but then what does it mean when something seems to have finished but then unexpectedly comes back? What does it mean when the return of that thing gives pain to some, and joy to others? We can be grateful that the brothers’ music lasted long enough to get them playing together again, and that it lasted long enough for us to get this thoughtful and rich musical film.
