Bruce Springsteen fans get liner notes of the most luxurious, informed and immersive kind with this documentary by longtime Springsteen chronicler Thom Zimny, who charts Bruce and the E Street Band on their current world tour (which returns to the UK and Europe next year, with a possibly-big-enough gap in the schedule on Glastonbury weekend). Springsteen himself is a bit of a cipher, choosing to contribute voiceover bookends which have the staged quality of his Springsteen on Broadway show. In between, his bandmates speak much more off the cuff as they detail the preparations for, and performances on, their first tour after six years away, a gap partly precipitated by Covid.
There’s an amusing moment early on as they gather for rehearsals, drummer Max Weinberg drily noting that the anthemic She’s the One has slowed to a funereal ballad pace in the time away. But they shake off the dust, with Steve Van Zandt declaring they don’t want to be “old men going through the motions … we want to blow fucking minds”. They head out on the road, with Zimny building up a satisfying hybrid of concert film, archival documentary and sociological study.
Crank the volume for the performances, which, though truncated, thunder out to good effect, and allow you to dwell on details closeup: Springsteen gurning ecstatically as he solos; the way he loves to let notes soar with minimalist purity before consuming them in a crash of noise.
The distancing effect of the film does, frankly, show up a couple of the straight rock’n’rollers as blustering and workmanlike songs when in a stadium they feel energising. But it also allows for some genuinely fascinating deep analysis of other songs, particularly their soul-recharging cover of the Commodores’ Nightshift, the brilliant backing vocalist Curtis King Jr reliving his improvisatory approach in real time. It also illuminates the way Springsteen structures the set list, with a two-song study of mortality in the middle (Last Man Standing into Backstreets) that is then answered by a long stretch of megahits, as a deliberate reminder to revel in life’s fleeting vitality.
When I saw this tour in Hyde Park I was granted VIP access and had the peculiar experience of watching this icon of working-class pride while stood next to email-checking investment bankers and, even more jarringly, Liz Truss. But amid the golden circle’s mire of abandoned ethics were Springsteen lifers who spoke with evangelistic fervour about their icon, and Zimny captures this hardcore quotient with individual vox pops at home in their cities, be it Monza or Oslo, as well as plenty of loving footage of upturned faces mid-gig.
Those fan interactions are each frustratingly brief, and perhaps there’s a bolder Springsteen film to be made that embeds itself purely in this fan community, rather like Jeremy Deller’s Depeche Mode film The Posters Came from the Walls. Zimny’s film-making style is certainly less adventurous, but his weaving of archive footage is deftly done – it’s fun to see the terrible sleeping arrangements on early E Street Band outings – and you’re left with the sense that this is a unit of people for whom rocking out and blowing minds is an irresistible lifetime pursuit. “After 50 years on the road, it’s too late to stop now,” Springsteen concludes, proud but with a tiny, funny note of trepidation.
• Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band is on Disney+ from 25 October.
