A rare film about promise and gratitude
That bratty race appropriator Eminem just put out a video for Communist China’s TikTok, boasting about his own frustration: “I get too flustered in my head!” Americans are being brainwashed “into thinking something great is going to happen,” he complains, amid a flurry of curses. “Nothing is happening. Nothing is happening! I get really flustered when I talk about it.” The repetition typifies Eminem’s traduced hip-hop (the rhetorical trope Lin-Manuel Miranda borrowed for Hamilton), and his rant is symptomatic of our demoralized pop-music industry — a crisis defied by the unexpectedly moving film Dreamin’ Wild.
Director Bill Pohlad sets this true story in Fruitland, Wash., a farming community whose name suggests promise. Pohlad dramatizes how Donny and Joe Emerson, farmer’s sons, recorded a pop-music album in their teens and how that promise comes back to rattle their adulthood. To Eminem’s eternal mortification, promise — and American hope — are what this film is really all about. Donny’s affinity for folk-rock predates the tribal denial of Eminem’s copycat rap and seems genuine. (Privileged moment: the close-up and sound of a phonograph needle hitting the grooves of a vinyl disc recall the start of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.)
Dreamin’ Wild is titled after the Emerson brothers’ one album, which flopped in the 1970s, dashing their expectations. Adult Donny (Casey Affleck), no longer a teen prodigy, runs an unsuccessful recording studio on the fringes of Seattle while Joe (Walter Goggins) still works the family farm. Their fate, seen on the fringes of showbiz, reveals the personal, emotional dynamics of family life and private ambition.
Donny’s dreams are half nightmares — haunted by the success that eluded him. He consoles his restless, insomniac son, “If you don’t sleep, you can’t dream.” It extends advice from his own father (Beau Bridges): “You exhaust the body, you free the mind.”
That strange patriarchal aphorism, coming from Donny’s devout Catholic dad, turns out to express a hard-work ethic. It’s what Donny needs to hear to free himself from the psychological weight of his own gift, his own smartness. When the boyhood album is rediscovered on the internet, sparking industry and media interest, Joe tells a reporter, “Donny’s a complicated sort of guy. He’s got a lot goin’ on in his head. He’s kind of a genius. It’s not always easy for him.” At that point Pohlad cuts to one of his many shots of the rural Washington landscape; the match of image and idea reminded me of Godard’s late period spiritual evocations, the product of intense cogitation — an artistic gift.
Pohlad had previously examined such genius in Love & Mercy, his 2014 film about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. Dreamin’ Wild is far less harrowing. It stays true to the Emerson brothers’ sustained family dynamics, the interplay of ego and need. Affleck and Goggins show each brother’s double emotions: their mutual defenses and self-sacrifice. (Noah Jupe and Jack Dylan Grazer as teenage Donny and Joe are especially good making their unguarded emotions transparent.)
A crosscutting device where Donny steps into a frame with his younger self conveys past and present, optimism and fear more successfully than Love & Mercy did, despite’s Paul Dano’s uncanny Brian Wilson characterization. Pohlad’s interest in musical eccentricity — pop culture’s native geniuses — comes across as an exploration of American promise, a promise that Millennial cynics like spoiled-child Eminem have come to distrust. The good moment of Donny’s comeback performance as an interiorized experience gives real feeling to both lingering youth and maturity. It evokes that Pitchfork website review that praised the debut album as “a godlike symphony to teenhood.” (Actually, it’s a Brian Wilson paraphrase, making this film a subliminal tribute to real brotherhood, improving on kitsch such as The Fabulous Baker Boys and Crazy Heart.)
Pohlad’s most careful scenes frame the real-life Emersons singing “A dream is beautiful / When something is beautiful you’ve got to let it show.” The movie is “dedicated to the strength, faith, and quiet dignity” of the entire Emerson family.” It significantly takes place outside of the flustered, politicized anger that infects the culture and by which Eminem specifically castigates those “white middle-class” Americans who disagree with him politically. (Internet pundits responded to his TikTok by declaring that “Trump breaks Eminem.”) Dreamin’ Wild is ultimately about those Americans struggling to be great again and with the perseverance to find their lost promise.
