Blinded By the Light

Grade: B

“Everybody’s out. We have the whole place to ourselves. It’s just you and me,” Javed says. “And Bruce,” his girlfriend replies. This is a telling exchange from Director Gurinder Chadha’s (Bend it Like Beckham, Bride and Prejudice) new film Blinded By the Light, out today. Javed is a thoughtful 16-year-old Pakistani living with his family in Britain in 1987. He’s the kind of kid whose Walkman headphones are almost permanently around his neck. One day, at school, a classmate gives him two cassette tapes to listen to – Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town and Born in the USA. He listens to it one viciously windy and stormy night (I believe Dancing in the Dark is the first song he hears), and he is hooked immediately. In one of the movie’s best sequences, the lyrics to the song appear in the air and are projected onto walls while the music, which is as good as I’ve ever heard it, triumphantly blasts through the theater. Many of the plot details seem to be taken out of Springsteen songs, so it makes sense that the lyrics resonate so much with Javed.

It was fun to mentally check off all the references I caught. Javed’s father worked at a factory, and then he got laid off on account of the economy, and he drove a (likely) used car that often had trouble going in reverse, and political tensions abounded with hate crimes, not to mention the father-son tensions where I guess they were just too much of the same kind. I also caught two anachronisms. In one scene, Javed is listening to the studio recording of Because the Night, which – while it was recorded in the late 70s – wasn’t released until 2010. Also, a random acoustic performance of The Promised Land from 2014 makes an appearance here.

I resisted Bruce Springsteen for most of my childhood. I thought I didn’t like him. I always thought the band was talented, the music was exciting, but I hated his voice in the late 70s, particularly on the Born to Run and Darkness albums. I think his voice is just fine from the River album to the present, though. In late 1999, I finally surrendered and drank the Bruce Kool-aid, and have seen him in concert 14 times (including 4 shows within 4 months back in 2000). The biggest reason to see Blinded By the Light is to hear these iconic rock songs with this kind of sound. It was a thrill. There are a few scenes which summon up the spirit of the jukebox musical, where one character is listening on headphones and singing along, then it doesn’t take long for the whole town to break into song and elaborately choreographed dance. Not very logical, but enjoyable. The screenplay will not win any points for originality. There’s a protagonist with big dreams, a love interest, a best friend, a falling-out and reconciliation with all of the above, and they figuratively join hands and march toward the inevitable feel-good ending. One of my favorites from Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary, the Dramatic Late Arrival Shot, is the most shameless. The disapproving parents walk through the door in the middle of a play/recital/speech/etc, of course the person on stage sees them and is caught off guard, but whatever they’re doing up there ultimately wins their approval.

I loved every Springsteen song featured, and I wanted more. There was nothing from Nebraska, Tunnel of Love, or The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, and all of the songs we did hear were more of the obvious choices. But then again, would I ever have been satisfied? Everybody’s got a hungry heart, and mine was one of the hungriest.

Grade: B