The unique spark of the film comes less from the music of Bruce Springsteen itself, though, than from the evocative feelings the film conveys through Javed. This is the kind of story you have heard plenty of times before, in just about any teen comedy where the protagonist needs to balance the values of familial loyalty and personal expression, but it’s also effective enough at the form that it’s easy to forget the parts that feel overly familiar. As a story about a singular protagonist and his narrow perception of the world, it occasionally struggles to keep the multiple subplots of Javed’s life equally engaging and wholly significant, but Kalra’s turn as Javed is relatably likable enough to justify the film’s tangential excesses. The dialogue is funny, the cast does well without exception, the 1980s production design is in your face, but no more so than the popular culture of the era itself was, and the direction and cinematography are workmanlike with occasional moments of inspired composition or kitschy flourish.
On a nuts-and-bolts level, Blinded by the Light is your serviceable teen comedy. But as he approaches the breaking point of his frustrations, a fellow classmate (Aaron Phagura) introduces him to a new musical artist, albeit one no longer contemporary: Bruce Springsteen. It's this one artist that transforms Javed's outlook on the world and gives him the motivation to become the kind of person he never felt he could. In order to cope with all these conflicting pressures on his life, Javed plans to study hard to go to university, to get away from his family and maybe turn his years of writing diaries and lyrics for his best friend (Dean-Charles Chapman) and his band into a career as a writer. He has trouble finding a girlfriend, finds himself on the receiving end of both casual and aggressive racism as fascism is on the rise in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, and has a domineering father (Kulvinder Ghir) who seems more concerned with being right than ever stopping to listen to what Javed wants or needs.
#Who sings blinded by the light movie
And it’s that adolescent understanding that transforms a somewhat rote, slightly bloated feel-good movie into a piece of inspiration in and of itself.īased on a memoir by Sarfraz Manzoor (who co-wrote the screenplay with Paul Mayeda Berges and director Gurinder Chadha), Blinded by the Light masks its autobiographical nature under the guise of Javed (Viveik Kalra), a British sixteen-year-old of Pakistani descent in a small English town in 1987. Blinded by the Light is a mainline right into that adolescent mindset, where all it takes is one artistic voice to speak to us clearly and connect with us in such a way to inspire radical change. It was a time of raw emotion, of barely contained anger at our limitations and unparalleled hormonal joy at newfound discoveries. It was a time when we searched for our identities, when we looked anywhere and everywhere for inspiration. For many of us, our teenage years were defined by our angst, our desire for freedom from the lives our parents had designed for us, our need for a life beyond our small towns.