Blinded by the Light movie review (2019)
Set in the 1980s in the small town of Luton, Javed's family struggles to make ends meet in the crushing recession of the late Thatcher era, battling economic strife, rising nationalism, and racist attacks. Javed's mother (Meera Ganatra) works out of their home as a seamstress, and his father (Kulvinder Ghir) works at a nearby factory. Layoffs loom. Parental expectation weighs heavily on Javed, who hides not just his dream of being a writer from his parents, but almost every other aspect of his personality. He's not allowed to have a social life, a girlfriend, independence. (Javed's father says to him at one point, "Pakistanis do not go to parties." Javed replies, "I thought I was British.") His best friend Matt (Dean-Charles Chapman) is swept up in the New Wave scene, and Javed writes lyrics for Matt's songs, feeling frustrated and trapped.
Bruce Springsteen isn't a presence at all in these early sequences, an accurate representation of what it was like in the early 1980s teenage music scene. Maybe your dad had Born to Run, or Nebraska in his collection. But Springsteen was from the past, he had nothing to do with "now." "Now" was Madonna and Prince and Pet Shop Boys and Tiffany and Michael Jackson. That is, until the 1984 juggernaut of Born in the U.S.A., filled with catchy tunes, but seething with political and social anger. The album is a real rager, verbalizing the loss, hardship, and poverty of the American working-class as Springsteen saw it all around him. (The xenophobes who consider "Born in the U.S.A." their anthem clearly haven't listened to the actual lyrics of the song).
One day, a Sikh classmate named Roops (Aaron Phagura) hands Javed a couple of Springsteen cassettes, sensing the troubled Javed may need it. As Javed listens to "Dancing in the Dark," his entire inner life explodes in a moment of revelation, reflected in the outer world as a gigantic wind storm wreaking havoc in his neighborhood (the Great Storm of 1987). It's like Springsteen himself created that apocalyptic storm. As Javed listens to “The Promised Land,” Springsteen's lyrics float through the air, projected onto the sides of buildings, walls, the music literally actualized in the air, in Javed's world. Javed never knew music could be like this, that music -- made by an American guy from some place called New Jersey -- could speak so directly to him, the son of immigrants in far-away England. Javed becomes an evangelist for Bruce. He dresses like him. He commandeers the school radio station. He plasters his wall with posters. His parents think he has lost his mind.
