Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band
Dir: Thom Zimny
★★★
DISNEY+
When director/editor Thom Zimny’s latest collaboration with Team Springsteen premiered mid-September at the Toronto Film Festival, Patti Scialfa’s quiet admission midway through the film that she has multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that attacks the immune system, stole the headlines. A week later, Bruce turned 75. Back 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.
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The Boss has been reassessing his work and reflecting on “the white hot light of an oncoming train” rushing his way since the loss of bandmates Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici, his 2016 autobiography and 2020’s Letter To You which confronted the death of George Theiss, Bruce’s brother in arms in teenage ’60s garage band The Castiles. Hence Last Man Standing from that album and The Commodores’ elegiac Nightshift, from 2022’s soul covers album, Only The Strong Survive, emerge as constant pivots in the narrative framing the tour’s largely pre-millennium setlist.
Zimny’s cameras are there when the E Street Band and Springsteen reunite in January 2023 in Red Bank, New Jersey, to begin rehearsing for their first tour in six years. Those first fly-on-the-wall hugs are about as intimate as he gets in a film that shares on method and motivation at the expense of an independent observational eye. When producer Jon Landau explains that Springsteen isn’t that keen on rehearsing these days and lone wolf Steven Van Zandt wryly shrugs that he’s been appointed MD a mere 40 years late, there’s a rare glimpse of the complicated dynamics that underpin any veteran outfit. Oddly given the title, there’s no mention of the bouts with Covid that dogged the band in spring 2023 or the peptic ulcer that forced Springsteen off the road at the end of that summer.
On the plus side, there’s copious stage footage as the tour moves from American arenas to European stadiums while the band, the additional brass players and backing singers are on-message talking heads. Thus Nils Lofgren steps forward to explain the rewards of diving deep into a fixed setlist while looking askance at the high jinks of the 2017 tour with its audience signs and song requests.
Springsteen is older than that now and while there’s romantic archive glimpses of the band on the road in the ’70s, whether in station wagon or bus, he’s not about to let us see how his tour party eats, sleeps or travels these days, let alone meditate on the impact of dynamic ticket pricing. Instead, he and his fellow players carefully unlock the process behind multiple on-stage musical epiphanies. Ultimately, writer/narrator Springsteen wants to impart his mission in the face of that runaway train – to bring intensity, to share “life’s possibilities”, to lift your spirits. Once he was born to run, now The Boss is working on how to endure.
Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band is available to stream on Disney+ from October 25.
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