SAVED BY THE BOSS Brian by Viner
This uplifting true story of how Springsteen’s music helped a lad from Luton survive racist bullies (and a domineering dad) will make you jump for joy
Blinded By The Light (12A) Verdict: Born to run . . . and run ★★★★✩
This is precisely the film that Danny Boyle’s recent, deeply disappointing Yesterday aspired to be — a sweet, funny, thought-provoking, big-hearted, exuberant movie with an Anglo-Asian lead, a title borrowed from a famous song, and a narrative driven by a single music catalogue.
The melodies and lyrics of The Beatles gave Yesterday a momentum that Boyle and screenwriter Richard Curtis rather squandered. here, director Gurinder Chadha and her co-writers Paul Mayeda Berges and sarfraz Manzoor (on whose memoir the story is based) do much better by Bruce springsteen.
Blinded By The Light reminded me in some ways of Bill Forsyth’s 1981 charmer Gregory’s Girl, as well as Chadha’s own 2002 hit Bend it Like Beckham. it is full of tenderness and joy. But there is a darker subtext as well, and maybe a sense that Chadha has in mind her own West London childhood as the daughter of immigrants.
The story is set in Luton, in 1987. Javed (the likeable Viveik Kalra) is 16, and indulges his love of writing not just by composing heartfelt poems and meticulously keeping a diary, but also by penning lyrics for his best friend Matt (Dean-Charles Chapman), who plays in a band.
Much of Javed’s writing is informed by dissatisfaction with his home town. ‘Lu’on is a four-letter word,’ he writes, and it’s easy to understand why. Ugly racism brews outside the family home, while inside, his strict Muslim father Malik (Kulvinder Ghir) will not compromise his belief that too much assimilation is a dangerous thing.
Malik arrived in Luton from Karachi in search of a better life, and has at least found a steady job in the Vauxhall car factory, but when he is laid off
along with half the workforce, life no longer seems better at all. it’s not much fun being his son, either. Javed has never kissed a girl — ‘i’ll find you a wife in good time,’ says his father — and isn’t allowed to go to parties.
Javed feels English, but his dad keeps telling him he’s Pakistani, a message robustly reinforced by local skinheads. A-levels and the possibility of a university place offer him his only exit route. Off he goes to sixth-form college, advised by his father to seek out the Jews in his class and do what they do, on the presumption that they’re all hard workers and high achievers. But for Javed, inspiration arrives in other forms.
A switched-on English teacher (hayley Atwell) spots his talent and encourages him to express himself. Even more excitingly,
while he is busy clocking the musical affiliations of his classmates — ‘Wham! boys, Bananarama girls’ — a new Sikh friend (Aaron Phagura) introduces him to the music of Springsteen, aka The Boss.
Javed is instantly smitten. The Boss’s lyrics about overcoming the constraints and disadvantages of working-class life, about dreaming big, seem to speak to him directly. That they were hatched in New Jersey in no way diminishes their relevance in Bedfordshire.
Initially, surprisingly, his dad isn’t too dismayed by his newfound passion, but only because he assumes this Springsteen chap must be Jewish.
Soon, emboldened by songs such as Born To Run and The Promised Land, Javed stands up to racists, audaciously commandeers the college radio station, and starts going out with Eliza (Nell Williams) from his English class.
There is a deliciously funny scene when Eliza takes him home for dinner with her uptight mother and father — who in their middle-class English way are just as hidebound and repressed as his own parents.
Most of this bowls along very engagingly, with great verve and wit, but Chadha and her writers also tackle important issues.
The blight of racism is presented in the form not just of physical assault by grown-up National Front thugs, but also by way of nasty little scallywags urinating through the letterbox of a Pakistani family — who would rather place a strategic plastic mat on the hall carpet than fight back or make a fuss. That has the awful ring of truth.
Moreover, the film deals cleverly with the complex issue of cultural assimilation, ensuring that Javed does not have a monopoly on our empathy by making his father a fundamentally good, caring man, desperate to provide for his family, hurt and bewildered that he cannot.
In less able hands, this could be clunky. Preachy, even. And in truth, Blinded By The Light is not what you’d call an exercise in subtlety. As Matt’s father, for example, Rob Brydon is not exactly encouraged to rein in his broader comedic impulses.
YET the whole thing works delightfully — and the period detail is a particular treat for those of us who feel we practically come from 1987, even weaving in BBC weatherman Michael Fish and his famously reassuring words to the woman who’d heard there was a hurricane coming, that there wasn’t.
If it can happen to a weatherforecaster it can certainly happen to a film critic, but I hope you won’t think this a Fishy prediction . . . that everyone who sees Blinded By The Light will leave the cinema smiling. I know I did.