Road Diary mixes demagoguery with dishonesty.
Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band is merely the latest Springsteen EPK (electronic press kit) directed by Thom Zimny, who has been a fixture of the pop star’s entourage for 25 years. (Zimny’s lugubrious Letter to You was released in 2020.) But this behind-the-scenes concert-tour film has been timed for release two weeks before the election; it’s part of the ABC-Hulu-Disney+ conglomerate’s election-interference strategy, as was its notoriously biased September 10 presidential-candidate debate.
This self-glorifying movie from the Springsteen camp poses the year’s essential media question: Whom can we trust? Fans might enjoy the glamorous trappings, basking in Springsteen’s celebrity aura the way listeners used to wrap themselves in the tales of American working-class, rock ’n’ roll aspiration on his best, movingly romantic albums Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, Born in the U.S.A., Tunnel of Love, The Rising, and Magic. (The judgmental Wrecking Ball album from 2012 began the absolute betrayal of that romance.)
But sensible film-watchers shouldn’t tolerate ringmaster Springsteen, now that he and Zimny have turned his self-conscious Americana into self-mythologizing. In Variety, Owen Gleiberman laughably compares Springsteen’s familiar stage pose — when he stands “with his head bowed, and cocks his guitar behind him” — to “a young Abraham Lincoln holding an ax over his shoulder.” He gushes, “It’s a mythic image of American nobility” and goes on to describe how Springsteen “share[s] the song of himself” as if he was the poet Walt Whitman. Actually, Zimny assembles video of adoring crowds from the band’s 2022–23 American and European tour like scenes from the Sermon on the Mount — had crowd-surfing been invented back then.
Zimny’s fan-magazine/gospel approach includes a montage during “Promised Land” of worshipful faces in the front row, an excuse for brief vox populi clips of the faithful at home testifying. It’s altogether unseemly and comes too close to the exaltation that Marco Bellocchio analyzed in Vincere, his shrewd, Obama-era scrutiny of the mind games that accompanied Benito Mussolini’s rise to power.
The messianic aspect of Road Diary competes with Springsteen’s recent non-musical ventures such as his podcast with former president Barack Obama, dishonestly titled Renegades — a deceitful prelude to his recent Instagram commercial opposing Donald Trump and endorsing Kamala Harris.
Springsteen’s political behavior has soured his former humble-tradesman image. Individual prerogative aside, a pop artist may trade on affection and goodwill, but Springsteen cheats on both fronts. The once-great pop star has become a terrible and phony politician. His workingman shtick, borrowed from socialist folk-music sentimentality, is sustained by the showbiz equivalent of the Democrat machine.
Celebrity support for Harris isn’t surprising given the era’s unignorable class divide. The shock is Springsteen repeating DNC talking points: He parroted Obama’s sneaky assessment of Joe Biden’s presidency as “consequential” when announcing, “We are shortly coming upon one of the most consequential elections in our nation’s history.” Then he checklists “the Constitution,” “peaceful transfer of power,” and “disqualify,” as if ventriloquizing Harris, Biden, and Liz Cheney. Springsteen’s hostage-video act horribly contradicts “the vision of America” he says he’s “been consistently writing about for 55 years.” His growly-voiced, plaid-shirted “sincerity” — filmed in a diner like the final scene from the New Jersey-set The Sopranos — resembles Kamala’s grinning Alpha Kappa Alpha black-sorority-girl bonhomie.
Springsteen’s pretense of common-man humility risks nullifying his former all-American independence; he has already thrown in with the upper crust during his publicized Mediterranean vacations with the Obamas, the Spielbergs, and Tom Hanks, effectively alienating any in the audience who had thought he was a workingman’s surrogate.
Road Diary captures the E Street Band’s first live show in six years. It’s their reunion after the Covid lockdowns, but Zimny is silent about that tyranny, producing only some solemn notes about aging and mortality but mostly snapshots of a celebrity’s “recovery” — more DNC propaganda. It’s the pop star’s privileged egotism that is nearly mortifying, especially since it has become overtly politicized. This includes closing his eyes to the damage and treason caused by the current administration. Road Diary is a deluxe version of his Kamala endorsement ad that started with the fatuous opening line “Hi, I’m Bruce Springsteen,” reintroducing himself as a demagogue.
NEWS FLASH: Clarkston, Ga.: At press time, Springsteen appeared before a mostly black crowd at a Kamala Harris rally headed by Samuel L. Jackson, Tyler Perry, and Barack Obama. Singing “Dancing in the Dark,” his lyric promised chaos. After two assassination attempts against President Trump, Springsteen revived his 1984 hit in a questionable way when he sang, “This gun’s for hire, even if we’re just dancing in the dark.” The ill-advised, incendiary lyric reminded disenchanted fans that Springsteen, whose career had been guided by the ultra-left liberals Jon Landau and Dave Marsh, from what used to be called the Rock-Crit establishment, is essentially a political stooge.