Western Stars align in new Springsteen movie
Movie of Springsteen’s barn concert ‘filled with the best kind of ghosts and spirits’
A new album from Springsteen effectively bookends what has been a cinematic summer of Bruce. August saw the release of the Sundance charmer Blinded By the Light, in which a young man growing up in late-’80s England connects to the music of the Boss. Now comes Western Stars, in which the singer-songwriter, who just turned 70, proves he still has something to say.
The film version is co-directed by Springsteen and longtime collaborator Thom Zimny, who also worked on the Netflix recording of Springsteen on Broadway.
The format couldn’t be simpler. The performer sets up a stage in a gorgeous old hay barn on his horse farm in New Jersey. Vaulted like a cathedral, it’s “filled with the best kind of ghosts and spirits.”
Accompanied by his wife, Patti Scialfa, and backed by a 30-piece orchestra (mostly strings), he works his way through the new album’s 13 tracks.
They have a decidedly country-western twang, in keeping with such apostrophe’d titles as Hitch Hikin’ and Chasin’ Wild Horses, though he refers to one song, There Goes My Miracle, as a “Southern California pop symphony.” It works with the interstitial visuals, which include wide-open spaces, horses on the gallop and a lot of grainy old home movies from the singer’s past.
Springsteen offers a brief introduction to each track.
“This is my 19th album and I’m still writing about cars,” he jokes at one point, adding: “The people in them, anyway.” Other musings are more personal: “For a long time, if I loved you and if I felt a deep attachment to you, I would hurt you if I could,” he says before launching into Tucson Train. But the comments are seldom more than a sentence or two. They’re philosophical nuggets, not an autobiography. (He wrote that in 2016.)
They’re still beautiful to listen to, especially with a cinema’s sound system and those backing strings.
Springsteen proves both visually and aurally generous — the camera often roams over the rows of violinists and cellists, while their performance rises with a crescendo between verses.
You can already listen to the album Western Stars (in fact I’m doing so as I write this review) but Western Stars: Songs from the Film gets a release when the movie opens, and features those powerful live performances, as well as Springsteen’s encore of
the Glen Campbell hit Rhinestone Cowboy.
If there’s one downside to the cinematic experience of watching and hearing Springsteen play, it’s the odd silence that envelops the theatre as each song ends. The small crowd in the barn applauds, and at a recent preview screening I could almost feel the viewers yearning to do the same.
One fan in the row behind me spoke for many of us. As one song faded out, he whispered a single syllable in awe: “Wow.”
For a long time, if I loved you and if I felt a deep attachment to you, I would hurt you if I could.
WESTERN STARS
•••• out of 5
Cast: Bruce Springsteen, Patti Scialfa
Director: Thom Zimny, Bruce Springsteen
Duration: 1 h 23 m
Bruce Springsteen had one goal in mind when he decided to step behind the camera to co-direct Western Stars — which is a live recreation of the album of the same name — he wanted to forge a deeper connection between him and his fans.
“It’s a continuation of the conversation we’ve been having since I was a young man,” the 20-time Grammy winner says.
The documentary, which is a concert film combined with the singer’s musings on life, premièred last month at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Following his 2016 memoir, Born to Run, and his sold-out Broadway shows in 2017 and 2018, Springsteen, who recently turned 70, says both the film and the album of the same name wrap up a trilogy of sorts. It’s a storyline that has found him still wrestling with love, loss, doubt, loneliness and regret.
“The older you get, the heavier the baggage becomes that you haven’t sorted through,” Springsteen says in the film. “So you run. And I’ve done a lot of that kind of running.”
Western Stars is co-directed by Thom Zimny, who worked with the rocker on The Promise documentary and shot Springsteen on Broadway for Netflix. It started out as just a straight concert film, but Springsteen found himself writing passages to bridge the songs as a way to cinematically reframe his 19th studio album.
“The filming really deepened the emotional content of the record,” Springsteen said in Toronto. “If you listen to the record, it’s its own experience, but making the film allowed me to tell a story that I hadn’t directly told before. It’s hinted at over the years in a lot of my work, and if you read the book I wrote or saw some of the play ... but filming just deepens the emotional content of that music in a way I hope will provide some entertainment and inspiration and insight to my fans.”
In the lead up to the record’s release in June, the Oscar winner knew he wasn’t going to tour to support it. Still, he wanted a way to communicate the album’s themes to his fans.
“I said, ‘We’ll just shoot the stuff live from start to finish,’ which we did and then we figured we’ll do some interviews (with) people talking about how great I am to work with and,” Springsteen continues breaking into a laugh, “what a pleasure and honour it was ... the usual s--t. We started to do some of that, and it didn’t quite feel right.”
So he hunkered down one evening and wrote a script that threads the performances together.
“I needed to draw people into the songs as they came up on screen ... It ties up some of the philosophical threads I’ve been working on my whole life, really, since I was a kid. I say at the beginning of the picture, ‘There are two sides of the American character. There’s the solitary side and the side that yearns for connection and community.’ I’ve spent a lifetime trying to get from one to the other ... how to reconcile those two things. It might be all those three things — the book, the play, the film — are summing up my truth to this point.”
Shot in a 100-year-old barn on his New Jersey estate with a 30-piece orchestra, the 13 intimate tracks, plus a bonus cover of Glen Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy, capture faded movie stars, stuntmen, drifters, aging characters and people running from circumstances beyond their control.
As he segues from one song to another, Springsteen peels back a layer of his personality and ushers you into his innermost world. It also offers a glimpse into his relationship with his wife of 28 years,
Patti Scialfa, with a rare look at some of the couple’s home videos added into the mix. Speaking over wide panoramic shots Zimny captured in California, he talks about how his marriage to Scialfa helped him to scrub the destructive parts of his personality.
“I was in my early 30s and I started to wonder, ‘Where is my everything?’ The band was great, we were playing great, but there wasn’t a lot else,” he said following the première. “That’s when I started to do some analysis. I saw that I was just stonewalling ... I didn’t have any place to go, but I needed to go someplace else very badly.
“I think if you want to thrive in life and continue to be creative both in your personal life and work life, you need to make these leaps of consciousness that will help you to move to the next place. And what allows you to move to the next place is, in the end, love. Love is what gets us through ... how do I find my way there? That’s what the film’s about.”