This isn’t just a movie about reawakened ambitions, but about how our teenage hopes inform our grownup selves, or perhaps haunt them. But in telling the story of Donnie and Joe Emerson-who, as kids in 1979, independently recorded a strange, wonderful album that almost nobody heard-Pohlad seems to be striving to capture an elusive cloud of feeling.
Where do great songs come from? Who really knows? Maybe the more piercing question is, Where do they go if no one hears them? Bill Pohlad’s Dreamin’ Wild is on the surface a straightforward story-based on real-life events-about what happens when two people who sought pop stardom as teenagers get a second chance in middle age.
