In a year of increasingly cynical filmmaker attempts to capitalize on the name-brand recognition that the world’s most popular musical artists hold, Gurinder Chadra’s Blinded by the Light is a decidedly earnest tribute to the effect that an artist’s music can have on a person’s formative years, no matter the cultural barriers (or oceans) that might separate them.
Here, that artist is Bruce Springsteen, and that young person in question is high schooler Javed (Viveik Kalra), a Pakistani Briton, who is chafing under the rule of his strict father (Kulvinder Ghir) and the general malaise of Thatcherite Britain in 1987. His family lives in a council house in Luton, where unemployment has run through the working population like a plague, and racist skinheads openly march in the streets. Javed’s a smart and sensitive young man, who escapes often into his diaries and his poetry, and he pens lyrics for his thick-headed but good-natured friend Matt (Dean-Charles Chapman) and his synth-pop band. But he’s missing something deep inside, a conduit for all of the large and powerful feelings that he’s holding within, and he finds it when a friend loans him two tapes — Born in the U.S.A. and Darkness at the Edge of Town.
From the moment he presses play on his Walkman, Javed is hooked, and through Springsteen, our protagonist starts to find that special something within himself. Emboldened by someone out there who understands his pain and plight as an outsider who just wants to love and be loved and to express himself, he begins to try and show himself as he is. He gives his poems to his receptive English teacher (Hayley Atwell), he finds the courage to ask out Eliza (Nell Williams), the cute radical in his writing class, and he even cuts off the sleeves of his flannel shirts and does his hair up just like The Boss does. But his father hates the fact that his son is drifting away from him culturally and, having lost his job earlier, begins looking for ways to express his dominance over his powerless son. He’s never a rote villain, as Chadha often paints a sympathetic portrait of the immigrant father coming to understand his culturally mixed son, but it’s their conflict that ultimately winds up defining Blinded by the Light. It’s a film chiefly about passion and its uses and misuses, and how that passion often comes from a place of cultural alienation.
Based on Sarfarz Manzoor’s memoir Greetings from Bury Park, Chadha enhances the material with her incredible skill at making the British Asian experience universal, much as she did in Bend It Like Beckham back when that swept the world stage in 2003. Her direction really shines during the few musical flights of fancy that she’s included in Blinded by the Light, such as a brief musical sequence set to “Thunder Road,” in which a whole market joins in on a singalong as Javed romances his punky classmate, or the music video-styled sequence in which our young protagonist first discovers Springsteen, with his lyrics projected on the walls of council flats as the wind rages around him. There’s even a lovely moment — a sequence where our leads run about downtown Luton as “Born to Run” blasts over the soundtrack — that feels more evocative of what Richard Lester crafted in A Hard Day’s Night then ten thousand generic studio attempts to capture the same magic ever could. But those moments work in service of the melodrama surrounding it, and the dramatic core of the story is incredibly compelling, if a bit cliched on a beat-to-beat basis. Indeed, most of the reveals and shifts in the film’s plotting can be seen coming from a mile out, if one has even a passing familiarity with the genre itself, but the film’s unique trappings go a long way towards concealing that.
The specificity of Manzoor’s real-life experiences enhances everything here, especially when it comes to Javed’s relatable blend of cringe-y fanboy attitudes and the earnest, deep feelings behind them. Those honest moments, like the one where Javed quotes song lyrics at length to his beau, Eliza, as a substitute for his own flailing words, are sure to stir some uncomfortable emotions in those out there who did the exact same when they were young with Beatles lyrics or Morrissey missives. The film’s resolution, as well, feels about as mature as one can make it, though it’s still firmly placed in the Hughesian tradition, and it offers a smart take on how one can blend their cultures and their loves together without betraying either. But that’s the beauty of Blinded by the Light: The closer we get to the truth of Manzoor’s life story, the more relatable and true the film becomes: it’s a powerful counter-narrative to the artificial trappings of many musician-centric dramas or coming-of-age stories (coughRichardCurtiscough). It’s a smart and sweet little film that will surely warm hearts all over the world, and honestly, even those who hate Springsteen might want to check it out, as they might find their hungry hearts driven closer to the promised land thanks to it.