Blinded by the Light
One of the pitfalls inherent in writing a screenplay about one’s own youthful experiences is that it rarely occurs to the writer to ask the question, “Why should we care about
this guy?” For such writers, the answer is implicit: “You should care because it’s me.” They little realize that the beloved entity they know as “me” is just “him” or “her” to everybody else, and there really needs to be a reason to sit through two hours of you, beyond the simple reason that you are you.
“Blinded by the Light” is cowritten by Sarfraz Manzoor, based on his memoir of growing up in the late 1980s as a teenager from a Pakistani immigrant family in England. The movie, which Manzoor cowrote, seems to be a somewhat fictionalized account, because the names are changed. But like the memoir, it’s all about how a teenage boy discovers and becomes obsessed with the music of Bruce Springsteen.
It’s hard to describe how bad this movie is and why it’s so bad.
Let’s try an analogy: Imagine a man who can’t dance, but loves dancing, and thinks that he’s the best dancer on Earth, so he keeps dancing and trying to take over the dance floor. The dancer’s sincerity will keep you from hating him, and at times, his intensity may even power his dancing to the underside of mediocrity. But mostly he’s just an embarrassing spectacle, and you’ll want to look away.
“Blinded by the Light” is like that — passionate in its sincerity, inept in its execution, misbegotten in its conception. This is not a movie about Springsteen or Springsteen worship, so much as a weird, insanely personal act of selfworship in the form of a movie, accomplished by Manzoor with the dedicated assistance of director Gurinder Chadha.
It fails in the most basic way: After seeing it, you will not want to put on a Bruce Springsteen album for at least a month.
The story does nothing to elevate Springsteen, and even worse, Springsteen can’t elevate the story, because Springsteen and the story have no apparent connection to each other — nowhere except in the mind of the protagonist, Javed (Viveik Kalra). He’s a young man who’s shy and bullied, not only by the neighborhood toughs but also by his strict, traditionalist father.
At one point, Javed openly defies his father and announces that he will be attending a Springsteen concert, despite the old man’s opposition. To emphasize his liberation, Javed takes the tickets out of his pocket and waves them. Whereupon everyone in the audience has the same thought, “If we know Dad is going to snatch the tickets and tear them up, how come Javed doesn’t know it?” Or maybe it’s just that kind of corny movie, full of obvious gestures like that.
Javed is a high school kid who wants to be a writer. He doesn’t really fit in. He’s not happy, and he’s never had a girlfriend. And then one day a friend turns him on to the Boss, and the next thing you know, he’s on an actual date. The end of the night arrives, and Javed loses his nerve and walks away without kissing the girl. But then, he starts reciting that great last verse to “Prove It All Night” — “what it means to steal, to cheat, to lie” — and this gives him the nerve.
Somehow she still wants to kiss him after hearing him mumble about stealing, cheating and lying.
For many of the songs, we are forced to see the actual lyrics swirling around Javed’s head. A few scenes lead to extended dance numbers, where Javed and his friends pour out onto the street in a Springsteen celebration and the whole world is dancing — though the director keeps one toe in reality, by implying that the street dancers are, in fact, dancing to another tune.
You can watch 100 movies and never see such joyless joy as in “Blinded by the Light.”