“What does he know about our world?” asks a Pakistani teenager in Luton, one of Britain’s cities in decline in the 1980s. The local skinheads follow him around the streets and his father has been sacked from his job at the car factory. Both the town and the country are falling apart, and no one has time to think about how a teenager feels – until someone lends him a couple of Bruce Springsteen tapes. But what does the Boss know about the life of a teenager in Luton? Quite a lot, as it turns out. “Bruce knows everything about my feelings,” the young man realises.
Gurinder Chadha’s coming-of-age story borrows its pace from American music but adapts its steps to Thatcher’s Britain. At the same time, the film evokes the sweat and the hunger in Springsteen’s lyrics. The teenager’s windbreaker soon gives way to a checked shirt and running from skinheads in the street to singing. Soon romance and freedom from her father’s dictatorship are also on the horizon.
Bruce Springsteen is once again a strong representative of the conscious side of the entertainment industry. His revolution, however, has always had a danceable quality. In true musical fashion, the melodies move the emotions, the hips and the feet above all. Baby we were born to run!
Kaisu Tervo