Summary

Dreamin’ Wild explores the beauty and pain of artistic talent and the emotional turmoil that comes with success and failure. The film’s excessive use of soft-focus cinematography and repetitive contemplative shots detracts from the impact of the protagonist’s pain portrayed by Casey Affleck. Despite its substantive themes, Dreamin’ Wild would benefit from better editing to cut down on slow pacing and unnecessary speechifying for a more impactful viewing experience.

Editor’s note: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.

For anyone who has seen Love & Mercy, the previous film from writer-director Bill Pohlad, watching Dreamin’ Wild is a curious experience. For one, they are deeply aligned: Two stories about real-life musicians struggling with their gift and its reception by the public, told by intersecting past and present storylines and by focusing on their relationships with family. The multitude of similarities really draws attention to the differences, and treating the movies as companion pieces would likely make for fruitful analysis. But, viewers who appreciated the 2014 film will also find themselves facing a less successful work this time around. The material is not lacking in thematic depth, but how the filmmakers choose to express these themes makes for an inconsistently engaging experience. Dreamin’ Wild is sometimes too caught up in its own artfulness, and all that weighted form ends up trapping its ideas rather than giving them heft.

Pohlad’s film primarily follows Donnie Emerson (Casey Affleck), a struggling musician who, in 2011, experiences a dramatic shift in fortune. As teenagers, he (Noah Jupe) and his brother Joe (Jack Dylan Grazer in flashbacks, Walton Goggins in the present) recorded an album, Dreamin’ Wild, on their family’s farm in Fruitland, Washington. It didn’t really go anywhere, but Donnie’s father, Don Sr. (Beau Bridges), decided to financially back his son’s career in music anyway, and it ended up costing them most of their farmland. For Donnie, who is now married with kids, the sting of that never wore off. So, when record executive Matt Sullivan (Chris Messina) suddenly gets in touch about his and Joe’s childhood album, he’s more than skeptical. But Dreamin’ Wild has built a genuine cult following, and when the Emersons agree to let it be reissued, critics hail it as a rediscovered treasure. Suddenly, everyone loves Donnie’s music.

Noah Jupe and Jack Dylan Grazer in Dreamin’ Wild

To talk only about the ideas explored in Pohlad’s Dreamin’ Wild is to overstate its impact. Like Love & Mercy, this movie is interested in the beauty and pain that can come from genius-level artistic talent, but Donnie’s story is also deeply entangled with failure in an emotionally thorny way. While his family seem to move through the world with an easy joyfulness despite facing genuine hardships, he carries guilt, shame, and resentment over how things went for him, buried several layers deep. Visits to his family farm, we are told, are rare nowadays. Getting the acclaim he has always craved means returning to old haunts, and reopening old wounds. The more time he spends at home, the more he gets lost in reverie, seeming to actually see his teen self live out a past moment. His inner turmoil then starts to bubble to the surface.

One of Pohlad’s best impulses is to not make Donnie’s struggle with his sudden success about a fixation on how his life could have been. Instead, it’s about his inability to return to the artistic state responsible for this new wave of admiration — adult Donnie isn’t an overnight success, his younger self is. Things start to turn for him when he is presented with the idea of performing his old music with his brother again, because he is forced to come face-to-face with everything about himself at that age he has lost, and may never recapture. This is potent insight about the nature of the artist, and potentially the stuff of moving drama. But Dreamin’ Wild’s approach to storytelling holds it back; like Joe’s drumming, the film struggles to keep an even pace, and repeatedly gets out of sync with its audience.

Casey Affleck and Chris Messina in Dreamin’ Wild

At its core, this movie misjudges our ability to read it. Stylistically, it leans excessively on soft-focus and handheld cinematography, often in closeup on Affleck’s face. His performance is all that’s required to understand the pain Donnie carries with him, but the film intersperses far too many of these contemplative shots, until it appears like Affleck’s performance is to blame, strumming the same note again and again to diminishing effect. His physicality during Matt’s first sales pitch, for example, tells us everything we need to know about the complexity of what this moment means for him. But after a few more scenes that communicate much the same thing, Donnie voices it to Matt, telling us something we’d already been shown a few times over.

This isn’t the only instance when something easily grasped the first time around is telegraphed in a few more shots before it’s said aloud. What’s peculiar about Dreamin’ Wild is that these are telltale signs of a pretender, a film dressed up in supposedly meaningful style without the substance to back it up, but that description feels unfair to a movie that is substantive. It just needs another editing pass — one that doesn’t mistake slowness for import and that cuts down on the Oscars-clip speechifying. Beau Bridges gives the film’s best performance as Don Sr., in part because he is allowed an emotional restraint the other characters are denied. While the Emerson patriarch speaks openly, his even-keeled good humor is constant, leaving Bridges only a subtler range of expression and intonation to show us his deeper feelings.

Barbara Deering and Beau Bridges in Dreamin’ Wild

Despite a third act that hinges on big, air-clearing conversations, the most affecting moment of Dreamin’ Wild comes in a flashback mid-way through. Through a lecture on hard work, Don has just pledged to back his boys’ pursuit of this dream. He rises to leave and Donnie, deeply moved by this show of faith, runs up to give him a hug, the emotional nakedness of which seems to take Don by surprise. All he can say in response, after a flustered moment, is, “That’s enough of that.” And it is — enough for us to understand who this man is, and the profound depth of his love for his son. A little more of that sensibility from the filmmakers would’ve gone a long way toward making a movie that lived up to its aspirations.

Dreamin’ Wild is in theaters August 4. The film is 110 minutes long and rated PG for language and thematic elements.