Blind­ed by the Light

The notion of music as the ulti­mate uni­ver­sal lan­guage gets a good-natured going over in this upbeat but gush­ing­ly sen­ti­men­tal com­ing-of-age sto­ry. Plot-wise it’s essen­tial­ly a whole­sale reprise of direc­tor Gurinder Chadha’s own 2002 hit, Bend it Like Beck­ham, only replac­ing footie with fan­dom – in this case for The Boss him­self, Bruce Spring­steen, a seem­ing­ly unlike­ly fix­a­tion for a Pak­istani teen in ​’80s Britain.

But Blind­ed by the Light isn’t a picky film, tak­ing its cues from count­less sto­ries involv­ing youth­ful ambi­tion frus­trat­ed by old-fash­ioned par­ents, from Rebel With­out a Cause through to Foot­loose. It’s just dis­ap­point­ing that Chad­ha and her co-writ­ers Sar­fraz Man­zoor and Paul Maye­da Berges make so lit­tle effort to buck the formula.

Adapt­ed from Manzoor’s 2007 mem­oir ​‘Greet­ings From Bury Park’ and giv­en the seal of approval by Spring­steen him­self, Blind­ed by the Light sets us down in sub­ur­ban Luton in the year 1987 (cue grainy footage of Thatch­er, Rea­gan and the miner’s strike). Javed Khan (Viveik Kalra) is a hope­less nerd, scrib­bling Adri­an Mole-esque poems about his sucky life and avoid­ing eye con­tact with girls.

But when he meets com­mit­ted Brooce fan Roops (Aaron Phagu­ra), Javed’s world snaps into focus. The Boss may hail from anoth­er con­ti­nent entire­ly but his and Javed’s con­cerns are essen­tial­ly in sync: they both believe in a promised land of love, accep­tance and escape from the shad­ow of over­bear­ing parents.

Because yes, Javed’s dad Malik (Kul­vin­der Ghir) is some­thing of an old stick­ler, unable to accept that his son might want to pur­sue some­thing oth­er than a career in busi­ness (you hope that some­where in the world there’s a sup­port group for Pak­istani fathers to help them deal with the relent­less mon­ster­ing they receive from Britain’s film­mak­ers). But Javed doesn’t care about eco­nom­ics, and he cer­tain­ly can’t face a career at the local car plant. Baby, he was born to run!

And that’s where Blind­ed by the Light takes its biggest risks. When Javed slips in his first Bruce cas­sette the film abrupt­ly shifts gears, drop­ping the soap opera real­ism, ani­mat­ed lyrics sud­den­ly flash on screen and cast Javed in stark the­atri­cal light. It’s a bold, unex­pect­ed­ly thrilling moment of youth­ful awak­en­ing, but lat­er efforts to weave Springsteen’s icon­ic songs into the nar­ra­tive are less suc­cess­ful. A sweet­ly impromp­tu ren­di­tion of ​‘Thun­der Road’ in a flower mar­ket is derailed when a mul­let­ed Rob Bry­don barges in on back­ing vocals, while a kooky Jules et Jim-inspired roman­tic mon­tage set to ​‘Born to Run’ just falls flat.

After its ini­tial flash­es of inspi­ra­tion, Blind­ed by the Light nev­er real­ly attempts to sur­prise us again – the plot runs on rails, and at almost two hours it can feel like a bit of a long haul. Kalra makes for a win­ning pres­ence in the lead, but he’s often stymied by some ago­nis­ing dia­logue – have song lyrics ever sound­ed good read out as prose? To be fair, Spring­steen him­self is rarely sub­tle – his songs say what they mean, and so does Blind­ed by the Light. But his lyrics are still poet­ry, filled with ache and ele­giac beau­ty. There’s pre­cious lit­tle of that here.