Roadside Attractions, 2023. Drama. 110 min.
Grade: 3 out of 4
Movies about struggling musicians and their ascension to musical stardom are as plentiful as auto-tuned T-Pain songs. Less plentiful are movies about struggling musicians who are on the cusp of musical stardom and then decide they don’t want it. In director Bill Pohlad’s melancholy and unconventional musical biopic Dreamin’ Wild, the reason that 40-something brothers Donnie and Joe Emerson don’t want it is because they wanted it when they were teenagers and they’re not teenagers anymore; they’re adults who’ve moved beyond their youthful dreams of roaring guitars and roaring crowds. Playing these unique, grown-up notes with a soft (bordering on too soft) touch that stays grounded and avoids mawkishness, Pohlad delivers a modestly pitched gem about two brothers whose story is all the more remarkable because it’s true.
In 1979, teenage siblings Donnie and Joe Emerson released an album recorded on their father’s 1600-acre farm in Washington state. The album, called Dreamin’ Wild, barely made a blip, was quickly forgotten, and the teen brothers moved on with their small town lives; the adult Donnie would tend to the struggling music studio he runs with his wife Nancy (Zooey Deschanel in an underwritten part) while the never-married Joe (Walton Goggins) stayed on the family farm. Thirty years later, the album is discovered in a thrift shop and then gets passed around the hipster music underground until the Emerson brothers find themselves in their 40s and getting their extremely belated chance at musical stardom. This is normally where the story would end but for Pohlad this is just the beginning. The always great Casey Affleck stars as the older Donnie with his usual world-weary gait and slightly pained and cracking voice. Throughout his career, Affleck has proved expert at conveying the haunted and conflicted melancholy of beaten down masculinity, and that makes him perfect for Donnie. When Matt (a relaxed Chris Messina), the head honcho of the indie label that wants to reissue the album, gives his pitch in the kitchen of the Emerson family home, Pohlad keeps his camera continually on Donnie, as the striving, hopeful teen prodigy he used to be seeps back into his consciousness, encroaching on the hard reality that he is no longer that person.
Since their childhood, Donnie was the musical genius of the two brothers. He wrote the songs and played guitar and piano. Joe—never as talented as Donnie and he knew it—played, at best, adequate drums. When their newfound fans start asking for autographs and they begin rehearsals for a make-or-break show, they slip back into their teenage roles. Donnie, whose desire for rock and roll stardom has been gingerly reignited, takes the musical lead, while Joe feels inadequate and, when Donnie recruits Nancy to play percussion, unnecessary. Pohlad has covered similar territory before. His overlooked Brian Wilson biopic, Love & Mercy, also featured an emotionally fragile musical genius. But here, Pohlad, who based his script on Steven Kurutz’s New York Times profile of the brothers, conveys in straightforward, heartfelt terms a man who bravely, if reluctantly, comes to realize that the regret he’s suffered since the long-ago failure of his first and only album have put his teenage aspirations in sepia-toned storage. “I feel like this dream is coming true but the wrong people are in it,” Donnie says.
Much like he did in with Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy, Polhad spends considerable time with the younger Donnie and Joe, allowing their past to make their present feel even more sorrowful. Noah Jupe (Stranger Things) plays the teenage Donnie with a thoughtful and serious air that we can envision turning ever inward as he becomes a more beaten-down adult. The younger Joe, whose self-sacrifice and acknowledgment that he’ll never be talented as his brother makes him the more heartbreaking figure, is played by Jack Dylan Grazer, smiling through the pain of inadequacy. The pair’s musical aspirations are bankrolled by their father (Beau Bridges), presented here in questionable fashion as a near-saint continually selling off parts of his farm to cover his boys’ musical aspirations (and to think: I had to fight for my father to raise my allowance to $5 a week). Whether Donnie harbored any guilt for that, we’re not sure, but we’d sure like to know.
That’s probably the only significant unexplored emotional avenue in a film that veers away from our expectations and towards something more downbeat yet also lovely and emotionally attuned, helped enormously by the unflashy and character-focused work of DP Arnaud Potier. His warm and bucolic images of an unchanging and isolated rural landscape trap the brothers in the past and feel as far removed from the rock and roll lifestyle as the brothers themselves. Such sensitivity denies us a dramatic knockout punch and Pohlad’s happy ending does not involve the crowd-pleasing acquisition of fame nor any material goods. But it does involve some hard-won self-knowledge, which is more satisfying. Even the curtain-closing performance by the real brothers, which could have been an eye-roller, puts a bittersweet non-fictional face on characters we’ve come to know and respect for their musical genius and their decision—almost unprecedented in our narcissistic, validation-starved world—that fame is no longer for them.