The relationship between an artist of any kind and his or her fans is compelling stuff and, thanks to the Internet, things may well be at a fever pitch. The new documentary Springsteen & I displays this relationship with what is effectively a scrapbook of footage from webcams, home videos, smartphones, and other modern mediums.
This is a love letter to Bruce Springsteen, a film packed with stuff from his fans that they put together themselves. Director Baillie Walsh helms the whole thing, but there’s really not much to it from a cinematic standpoint. It’s more a collation of clips that one could stumble upon and paste together for YouTube.
Springsteen & I details fan adventures and misadventures for its brief runtime. The people are desperately sincere, but some are quite frankly pretty silly. One woman in particular details a moment with Springsteen that seems goofily quixotic and sexual in nature, while another couple dances in their kitchen without having ever gone to a show.
This is all part of the fan experience and the connections the Boss’ devotees feel can be sublime stuff, especially when it leaves the confines of his concerts and enters the streets. The best “segment,” if it can be called that, involves grainy footage of Springsteen playing with a street musician for a small crowd.
There are fans who’ve been to countless concerts and there are fans who haven’t been to any. There are fans with money and fans without. Like with most artists, the fandom runs the gamut of different types of people. And, like with most artists, the fandom is often obsessive and without much grounding in the actual art. In Springsteen & I, there’s little about Springsteen that actually feels unique.
That’s really the trouble with Walsh’s work and, in the end, it feels like there’s not much of a point to it. It’s one of those “for the fans, by the fans” vanity projects that is nowhere near a rock documentary and more like a bonus feature from a rock documentary.
[SPARKS FLY EVERY MONDAY: Check out our weekly feature ‘Sparks Fly on E Street,’ where Mark Saleski breaks down Bruce Springsteen’s legendary career – song after memorable song.]
And in this day and age of smartphones capturing every celestial moment between artist and fan anyway, what can be said for simply putting heaps of those moments all in one place? The lens is pervasive and fan-only moments, those sorts of storybook interactions, rarely exist without ample evidence anymore. In other words, we’ve literally seen it all before.
So sure, it’s neat on one hand to hear about how a factory worker was given front row tickets at Madison Square Garden to see the Boss and the uncut half hour or so from the Hyde Park concert makes a nice nightcap to Springsteen & I, but overall this film is unsatisfactory. It’s not for lack of emotion or effort, but it’s hard to “give a damn for the same old played-out scenes” after all.
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Distributed by NCM Fathom Events, Springsteen & I will play in select U.S. movie theaters on Monday, July 22 and Tuesday, July 30 at 7:30 p.m. local time.
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you’re right that we’ve probably seen this all before. when this project was first announced, i immediately thought of the Springsteen fan book that came out a few years ago: For You Bruce. in a similar fashion, fans put together and submitted their own Bruce stories.
whether this movies is anything like that book, i don’t know (haven’t seen it).
but anyway, what follows is my own entry to For You Bruce. it is certainly part of the same old played out scene, but sometimes that’s all we’ve got..
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A whole lot of years have passed since my first Bruce show on The River tour, Cleveland, 1981. I’ve attended so many Springsteen concerts since then that the musical experiences – from Bruce bringing Southside Johnny to that Cleveland stage to knock us out with “I Don’t Want To Go Home” to the Boston Seeger Sessions show ending with Bruce and Peter Wolf sharing the mic for a rousing “Dirty Water”/”Buffalo Gals” – have crystallized into a history of sorts, one so real that it feels like I’m part of a family: the E. Street extended family.
This may strike the reader as a kind of fanboy hyperbole but consider this phenomenon: when Bruce launches into a song, I get the feeling that a third presence has entered the room – band, audience, song. The idea came to me at the start of the 1999 reunion show in Boston. Bruce, Miami Steve and Nils faced the guitar amps and allowed the squall of feedback to build. As Bruce counted off into “Adam Raised A Cain,” it was not just another song, but a musical link into a long chain of shared experience. The song triggered a rapid internal playback of every “Adam”-associated memory: feeling lost and lonely at the age of 17, old girlfriends, other shows, reading Kerouac’s On the Road, my ex-wife’s Plymouth Volare, sex, marriage, feeling lost and lonely at the age of 32, divorce.
Though difficult to verify, it seemed impossible that everybody else in the Fleet Center that night did not have a similar experience. After all, they’re family…right?
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