When I think back to the summer of 2012, the soundtrack is Donnie and Joe Emerson's Dreamin' Wild. The album, independently recorded in the late '70s by teenage brothers from Fruitland, Wash., had just been dusted off and reissued, a thrift store curio that was suddenly being embraced by 21st-century hipsters everywhere.
I listened to Dreamin' Wild over and over that summer, entranced by its mood, pulled in by its effortless melodies. It's endearingly clumsy and unwaveringly sincere, and because the Emersons were isolated physically and culturally, the music has an unstudied honesty and spontaneity. Listening to those songs today, it not only feels like I'm eavesdropping on the Emersons making them 45 years ago, but it transports me to the summer I first encountered them. I can remember who I was with, the type of beer we were drinking, what we talked and laughed about deep into the night as Donnie and Joe's song "Baby" purred on the speakers for the dozenth time.
Now there's a film, also called Dreamin' Wild, that dramatizes the album's unusual journey out of obscurity, and its best moments capture the magic of the Emersons' music. On its face, the movie is a standard artistic redemption story about a musician confronting an unexpected second act in his career. But it's also an evocation of the past, of a fuzzy memory floating back into your conscience.
The story proper begins a little over a decade ago. Donnie (Casey Affleck) and his wife Nancy (Zooey Deschanel) are playing together in cover bands, often as background music to distracted banquet rooms. They own a Spokane recording studio, but clients are canceling sessions and the bank is calling to collect. Then Donnie hears from Joe (Walton Goggins) that music blogs have caught wind of Dreamin' Wild, and now the boutique Seattle label Light in the Attic wants to re-release their album.
As the brothers prepare for a reunion show of sorts, they struggle with notoriety in different ways. Joe, who lives a stone's throw from the house where he grew up, sees the rediscovery of Dreamin' Wild as an exciting diversion, and as a chance to spend more time with his brother. Donnie, who's been a working musician for most of his life, has second thoughts about becoming famous not for his new music, but for something he made as a kid.
Interspersed with these scenes are flashbacks to the late 1970s, filmed on the actual Emerson family farm, that show us how the album came to be. How teenage Donnie (Noah Jupe) and Joe (Jack Dylan Grazer) begin to experiment with music — Joe on drums, Donnie on guitar and just about every other instrument. How their father (Beau Bridges) builds them a recording studio where they can create their own albums. How thousands of Dreamin' Wild LPs collect dust in the basement, and how the family nearly loses their homestead because of it.
The movie Dreamin' Wild was written and directed by Bill Pohlad, whose 2014 debut Love & Mercy examined the artistry of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson from two distinct points in his life. Pohlad adopts a similar structure here: The past and present are often in conversation with one another, and the youthful ambition and tireless creative spirit of young Donnie and Joe stands in stark contrast to the world-weary pragmatism of their adult counterparts.
This is a gentle, lowkey movie; it's so lowkey, in fact, that it sometimes comes across as sleepy rather than meditative. It also misses an opportunity to deepen the character of Nancy: She's Donnie's main collaborator and partner, and while she briefly vents her frustrations about her own artistic ambitions being disregarded, the movie similarly gives them short shrift. Pohlad is primarily concerned with the sacrifices fathers make for sons and brothers make for brothers, but it's disappointing that he lets Deschanel, herself an accomplished musician, vanish for long stretches of the film.
But Dreamin' Wild is an unmistakably heartfelt movie, and it ends on a few lovely grace notes, including one that brings the real Emersons into the fold. As a filmmaker, Pohlad inherently understands why this long lost album was such a wondrous discovery, and why it still sounds so uncanny and yet so perfect. Its title is apt, too: This is a story about how dreams can come true, but it's never when you expect and never in a way you can control. ♦
DREAMIN' WILD
