white_hart

After an uninspiring few weeks at the cinema, tonight we went to see the other music-based British film branded as "the feel-good hit of the year!" on the sides of buses. Unlike Richard Curtis and Danny Boyle's sunny seaside Beatlemania froth, Gurinder Chada's new film, Blinded by the Light felt like it had some substance to it. Along with, obviously, some of the greatest songs ever written.

Blinded by the Light is based on a memoir by journalist and Springsteen obsessive Sarfraz Manzoor, and tells the story of 17-year-old Javed, an aspiring writer who despairs of ever getting away from his Luton home. It's set against a background of the racial tensions and unemployment of late-80s Britain (the National Front march through Luton, and Javed's father is made redundant following swingeing cutbacks at the Vauxhall works), while at home Javed's traditionalist father refuses to countenance his son's moving away for university or even going to a party hosted by the neighbour he's been friends with all his life. Frustrated and despairing, having to lie about studying English for A-level instead of Economics, Javed's life changes when he listens to the Bruce Springsteen tapes a friend at sixth form college has lent his, and he hears his own life in the Boss's lyrics.

I loved how perfectly the film evoked what it was like to be a teenager in the 80s. There are so many elements that remind me how my past looked, from the blocky cars to the silk scarves Javed's girlfriend Eliza wears tied in a big bow round her hair (I had so many of those scarves!) to the Parker rollerball Javed writes with (I had a Parker rollerball. Did you have a Parker rollerball? If you were a teenager in the UK in the late 1980s, you quite possibly did). And more than that, I loved how it evoked what it was like to listen to the music that spoke to your soul; to put your headphones on, press play on your Walkman (or cheaper own-brand alternative), slide the volume to high and feel like the whole world was a music video unfolding around you. The film does this brilliantly through the use of quasi-fantasy sequences where the people around Javed join in dancing along with him; it could be cheesy and awkward, but for me it came down on the right side of that. There were lots of pop-culture in-jokes which raised laughs among the audiece (Michael Fish's 'A woman phoned the BBC to say there was a hurricane on the way...' and Javed's father's response to finally listening to Springsteen were the biggest ones), and while absolutely not romanticising either the 80s or Luton and not skirting the very real issue of racism, then and now, there are also a lot of moments where people are shown to be kinder and more generous than first appearances might have led us to believe. I definitely recommend this, even if you don't like Springsteen, though obviously it's even better if you do like the songs.