Some glory days not fit for big screen
One of the pitfalls inherent in writing a screenplay about one's own youthful experiences is that it rarely occurs to the writer to ask the question, "Why should we care about this guy?" For such writers, the answer is implicit: "You should care because it's me." They little realize that the beloved entity they know as "me" is just "him" or "her" to everybody else, and there really needs to be a reason to sit through two hours of you, beyond the simple reason that you are you.
"Blinded by the Light" is co-written by Sarfraz Manzoor, based on his memoir of growing up in the late 1980s as a teenager from a Pakistani immigrant family in England. The movie, which Manzoor co-wrote, seems to be a somewhat fictionalized account, because the names are changed. But like the memoir, it's all about how a teenage boy discovers and becomes obsessed with the music of Bruce Springsteen.
It's hard to describe how bad this movie is and why it's so bad. Let's try an analogy: Imagine a man who can't dance, but loves dancing, and thinks that he's the best dancer on earth, so he keeps dancing and trying to take over the dance floor. The dancer's sincerity will keep you from hating him, and at times, his intensity may even power his dancing to the underside of mediocrity. But mostly he's just an embarrassing spectacle, and you'll want to look away.
"Blinded by the Light" is like that — passionate in its sincerity, inept in its execution, misbegotten in its conception. This is not a movie about Springsteen or Springsteen worship, so much as a weird, insanely personal act of self-worship in the form of a movie, accomplished by Manzoor with the dedicated assistance of director Gurinder Chadha.
It fails in the most basic way: After seeing it, you will not want to put on a Bruce Springsteen record for a month. The story does nothing to...