Blinded by the Light

Release Date: August 16, 2019
Runtime: 118 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Studio: New Line Cinema
Director: Gurinder Chadha
Cast: Viveik Kalra; Kulvinder Ghir; Aaron Phagura; Dean-Chalres Chapman; Nikita Mehta; Nell Willians; Rob Brydon; Hayley Atwell

And the winner for crowd-pleaser of the year goes to…Blinded by the Light! Gurinder Chadha’s enormously heartwarming (based on a) true story will without a doubt melt the resolve of even the most hardened moviegoers for the majority of its two hour running time, regardless if you like the music of Bruce Springsteen or not.

Based upon the book “Greetings from Bury Park: Race, Religion and Rock N’ Roll” by Sarfraz Manzoor, Blinded tells the story of Javed (Viveik Kalra, in an enormously appealing lead performance), a teenage Pakistani boy desperately existing in working class Luton, Britain, during the oppressive Thatcher years of the 1980s. Like many teenagers, Javed has trouble assimilating into high school, mostly because he is confronted with overt racism from several of his white peers, despite having a white, British best friend, Matt (Dean-Charles Chapman), and the romantic interest of a white, British young lady, Eliza (Nell Williams). Javed’s cultural crisis extends to his home life where his domineering father (Kulvinder Ghir) dispiritingly tries to drill into Javed’s head that, because of his Pakistani lineage, he will never be accepted as British. Furthermore, Dad angrily (almost violently) dismisses Javed’s interest in creative writing and insists that Javed hang out with Jewish classmates (because they’re successful) and work towards becoming a lawyer or an estate agent. The core of the film follows Javed as he progressively works up the courage to rebel against his father’s strict cultural mores and find his own path in life. Luckily for him, Javed is thrown a transformative lifeline by his classmate, Roops (Aaron Phagura), from whom he is introduced to the music and the lyrical poetry of Bruce Springsteen.

The movie’s narrative trajectory is standard stuff: beat-by-beat, you can forecast with fair certainty where the story is going. So, no surprises here. Perhaps to compensate for what is, in its essence, a formulaic plot, Chadha and co-screenwriters Paul Mayeda Berges and Manzoor spotlight the socio-economic ramifications of Thatcherian England during this period (the protests, the economic devastation, etc.) and the unsettling racism Javed and his family encounter on a regular basis. It must be noted that the eerie similarity to present-day race relations in America and abroad could not have been unintentional by the filmmakers and will almost assuredly cause one’s mind to draw current parallels. To their credit, the filmmakers do a bang-up job re-creating the 1980s milieu in which the movie is set: the crimped hair on the high school girls, Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now” prominently featured on the school radio station, the school principal’s hilariously vintage mobile phone, the list goes on.

While the movie starts out disappointingly slow, it catapults into high gear once Javed is introduced to The Boss in a stupendous sequence set to “Promised Land.” From that point on, the movie finds its true raison d’être as an exuberant celebration of following your dreams against all odds and claiming one’s life in this cold, hard world – nicely paralleling the themes that run through much of Springsteen’s lyrics. While Blinded is not a musical in the traditional or even revisionist sense of the word, Chadha stages several musical numbers that burst off of the screen (the “Born to Run” sequence alone is worth the price of admission) that will have audiences beaming (try not to get goose bumps when Javed and Roops break into “Badlands”).

While the vast majority of Springsteen’s music presents the predominant text of the workingman’s struggle to make a better life, his lyrics breathe an air of hope and “pulling out of here to win”-ness into the songs that provide a direct representation of Javed’s plight. He dreams of becoming a successful writer and busting out of dreary Luton and the oppressiveness of his family – it’s no wonder that Springsteen’s lyrics (more than the melodies) speak to him. Chadha creatively literalizes Javed’s thoughts via Springsteen lyrics streaming across the screen during several musical segments.

Blinded by the Light, like Chadha’s other notable success Bend It Like Beckham, is unquestionably constructed to have audiences cheering. Yet, on a more personal level, the film will strike a nerve with anyone who has ever felt out of place, ever felt the struggle of trying to be their unique selves within a circle that demands conformity, or the soul-crushing denial of support from those whom we need it from the most. This one’s for us!