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#Bruce springsteen blinded by the light movie

"A Pakistani into Springsteen - now that's got potential," says the school magazine editor, observing Javed's newfound fandom like some walking, high-concept movie logline.Īaron Phagura plays Roops, Javed's Springsteen-mad classmate and the only other South Asian high school student.

Faster than you can say 'unlimited music rights' Javed is plunged into 24/7 Springsteen rapture, bedroom twirling to a lightning montage set to Dancing in the Dark and gushing out newly inspired poetry and lyrics - many of which find themselves scrawled across the screen, in one of those unfortunate formal tics of recent cinema. When Javed's Sikh school buddy, Roops (Aaron Phagura), passes him cassettes of Born in the USA and Darkness on the Edge of Town, it's a gateway to another world. We're meant to laugh at his foolishness, and the supposed shallowness of pop music next to Springsteen, who the film offers as a bastion of musical authenticity. "Synth is the future," says pretty-boy mulleted Matt, who gets mocked by his own Boss-loving, rock-n-roll dad (Rob Brydon, making an always-welcome cameo). ( Supplied: Universal Pictures/Nick Wall) And it helps, of course, that the Desi-British setting is still relatively novel to American audiences.Director Gurinder Chadha describes Blinded by the Light as the "spiritual companion" to her 2002 film Bend it like Beckham. It’s in that third-act reverse journey that Blinded by the Light retunes and overcomes those tropes, as Javed sheds his rockist snootiness, adds new layers to his relationship with his dad, and susses out what he needs to take from-or to take leave of-his idol. Blinded by the Light sits squarely in the tradition of movies where the protagonists go too far in their revolt and have to find a happy medium between accommodation and self-importance. Once converted, his new priorities are simple: kiss a girl (Nell Williams), get his writing taken seriously, get out of his claustrophobic hometown, and stop being the good boy whose goodness is slowly killing him inside. Javed never seems to have heard of teenage rebellion until he’s introduced to Springsteen by another friend (Aaron Phagura). Even darker is the assimilationist (or is it colonial?) logic that such premises suggest: The “good” protagonists of color-the ones who deserve to be the heroes of their own wide-release, feel-good movies-are the ones who happen to like and identify with all the same stuff white people do.īlinded by the Light is a moving exploration of how the identities of second-generation immigrants are formed by choosing and adapting the parts of each culture that speak to us. (If he has any thoughts about the band’s Eastern excursions, which sometimes took turns into Orientalism, we’re certainly never privy to them.) Mainstream cinema is no stranger to post-racial fantasies, but-with two of these movies released practically back to back-there’s something undeniably icky about the prospect that brown protagonists are more palatable if they worship at the altars of white cultural figures. Yesterday never acknowledges the Fab Four’s (rather well-known) dabblings in Indian music and philosophies, so Jack (Himesh Patel), the protagonist who carries on their musical legacy, doesn’t grapple with them, either. The first, of course, was Yesterday, in which director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Richard Curtis fashion an alternate universe that has somehow never been touched by either the Beatles or race. That’s certainly how I approached Blinded by the Light, the second movie in nearly as many months about a Desi Brit obsessed with white boomer music. Some movies, especially on paper, feel like minefields: You enter them gingerly, if at all, waiting for flashes of irritation to erupt. What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in King RichardĪn Exhaustive List of Every Broadway Cameo in Tick, Tick … Boom! King Richard Turns the Story of the Two Greatest Female Athletes of All Time Into the Story of One Male Hero.Paul Thomas Anderson’s New Movie Is About an Age-Gap Romance.