‘Dreamin’ Wild’ Review: Casey Affleck Hits a Melancholy Note in a Sweet Ode to Dreams Deferred

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic Not many films hit an emotional crescendo around the publication of a Pitchfork review, but Bill Pohlad’s “Dreamin’ Wild” is sufficiently sincere and embedded in musical nerdery to make it work.

As onetime brother act Donnie and Joe Emerson huddle with their family around a 30-years-late evaluation of the album they recorded as teenagers, one particular critical reference sends them giddily reeling: “To twist a Brian Wilson phrase,” it reads, “[the album] is a godlike symphony to teenhood.” For fortysomething Donnie, who has spent his whole adult life scrambling for anyone to listen to his music — let alone love it — the mere mention of his musical hero in relation to his work is a crowning triumph: Donnie, as played by a typically disheveled, downcast Casey Affleck, looks briefly, guardedly happy for a moment, and this often melancholic film is suddenly suffused with well-being.

For those who remember Pohlad’s last film, the fine, deeply felt Brian Wilson biopic “Love & Mercy,” the name-drop neatly underlines a common thread between Wilson and Emerson, at least as presented on screen: two brilliant, emotionally fragile men, made and undone by their obsessive, possessive devotion to their music, working towards their own kind of peace.

The music itself aligns too, with Emerson’s late-‘70s brand of soft rock and blue-eyed soul audibly in thrall to Wilson’s writing and densely layered production style.