Western Stars

Grade: A-

If there’s any artist alive who can cause me to give a movie a last-minute grade boost while still in the middle of writing the review, it’s Bruce Springsteen. I have done this long enough to know where each grade lives in my body, but on occasion, the annoying quandary will come up where I’m on the fence between two grades. Give the higher one, and I worry that I’m a softie that has become too generous. If I give the lower one, I get the nagging knotty feeling in me that says “…but I liked it a little better than that.” Chances are if I have a tiny gut impulse to give a higher rating, just err on the side of being a softie and go up. Life is too short.

Any superlative adjectives I can think of to describe the experience of seeing Springsteen perform his music on the big screen have likely been overused by me already. Four months ago, he released Western Stars, one of his best in the last 20 years – what I’d call the reunion era. He decided not to go on tour with Western Stars, so he filmed a live performance of the album in a 100-year-old barn on his property in New Jersey, and made it into a movie – a limited Fathom Events engagement.

The barn deserves its own paragraph. Let’s talk about it. There is a full-service bar. Its walls and high ceiling are decked out with strings of lights. Outside, there appears to be nothing but acres and acres for the Springsteen horses to run around. [Jessica Springsteen, the middle child, is into equestrian.] There are tables for the lucky spectators who are invited to this live performance, which features a handful of musicians, not counting the 30-some piece orchestra. Interspersed in between all the songs are lots of stock footage of horses and cars while Springsteen provides voice over narration where he uses his usual pretentious pontifications that I usually don’t “get” the first time around, but have learned to find amusing. There are a few nuggets of wisdom amidst these. The one that hit me the hardest was when he said, about life, “Nobody gets away unhurt.” Just recognizing that we’ve all been hurt. See? You don’t have to try to sound so smart. The simplest things can have the most impact.

It is worth noting that Springsteen has played 7 of his albums live, start-to-finish, and we have officially released versions of all 7 in some fashion. The performance of Western Stars, the album, is the most effective when they break out and make it different from the studio release. I loved Charlie Giordano’s piano solo in The Wayfarer. The title track is my favorite, and I’d take it in any form. Sleepy Joe’s Cafe is better live than on the album, but I heard piano throughout. The usual piano guy is playing accordion on it. A vacant keyboard shows up in multiple shots. Some overdubbing and lazy editing is happening here. There has been much praise on the message boards about Stones, and deservedly so. I loved the violin solo, and the look on her face, because she knows she nailed it. It was quite moving to see Bruce and his wife Patti sharing a microphone, with 31 years of life experience under their belts since they did that on Brilliant Disguise and Tougher Than the Rest in 1988. They duet again on the album’s last track, Moonlight Motel, and at this point, the audience is gone, and the chairs are stacked on the tabletops. It’s a nice touch.

I have mentioned before the neat symmetry that came about with the Western Stars album and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood being released so close together. Many of the songs could have been about Brad Pitt, Leonardo Dicaprio, and the other characters from the Tarantino film. I know a perfect double-feature next summer that I will partake in. I’ll watch the Western Stars movie, followed by OUATIH. But if you can, you should really see Western Stars in the movie theater. The music on that sound system will reach out and flow right through your heart and bones, like a highway jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive.

Grade: A-