Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band review

Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band

Directed by: Thom Zimny

★★★

DISNEY+

When director/editor Thom Zimny’s latest collaboration with Team Springsteen premiered in mid-September at the Toronto Film Festival, Patti Scialfa’s silent admission mid-film that she has multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that attacks the immune system, stole the headlines. A week later, Bruce turned 75 years old. In February, Springsteen’s 98-year-old mother Adele died and a clip of them dancing to Glenn Miller’s In The Mood is the coda to this methodical account of the E Street Band’s post-Covid world tour. .

The Boss has been reevaluating his work and reflecting on “the warm white light of an approaching train” rushing toward him since the loss of bandmates Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici, his 2016 and 2020 autobiography Letter to you which confronted the death of George Theiss, Bruce’s brother-in-arms in the ’60s teen garage band The Castiles. Hence Last Man Standing from that album and The Commodores’ elegiac Nightshift from their 2022 soul covers album, Only the strong surviveemerge as constant pivots in the narrative that frames the tour’s setlist, much of it pre-millennium.

Zimny’s cameras are there when the E Street Band and Springsteen reunite in January 2023 in Red Bank, New Jersey, to begin rehearsals for their first tour in six years. Those unexpected first hugs are as intimate as it gets in a film that shares method and motivation at the expense of an independent, observant eye. When producer Jon Landau explains that Springsteen isn’t much interested in rehearsing these days and lone wolf Steven Van Zandt shrugs wryly about being named doctor just 40 years late, there’s a rare glimpse into the complicated dynamics that underlie any veteran team. . Oddly given the title, there is no mention of the struggles with Covid that dogged the band in the spring of 2023 or the peptic ulcer that forced Springsteen off the road later that summer.

What time is it? Springsteen and Steven Van Zandt ignore another local curfew.

On the plus side, there is copious stage footage as the tour moves from American arenas to European stadiums, while the band, additional brass players, and backup singers are talking heads in the message. So Nils Lofgren steps forward to explain the rewards of diving deep into a fixed setlist while squinting at the 2017 tour’s banter with its audience signals and song requests.

Springsteen is older than that now and although there are romantic glimpses of the band on the road in the ’70s, whether in a station wagon or on a bus, he’s not willing to let us see how his touring group eats, sleeps or travels these days, Let’s meditate alone on the impact of dynamic ticket pricing. Instead, he and his fellow musicians carefully unlock the process behind multiple onstage musical epiphanies. Ultimately, writer/narrator Springsteen wants to convey his mission in the face of this out-of-control train – to bring intensity, to share “life’s possibilities,” to lift your spirits. Once he was born to run, now The Boss is working to resist.

Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band is available to stream on Disney+ starting October 25th.

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