October 24, 2024
EDITOR'S NOTE: Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band officially becomes available for streaming on Hulu and Disney+ tomorrow, Friday October 25. Below is our review of the film, along with SoundCloud and YouTube links for our great half-hour conversation with Road Diary's director, Thom Zimny, and a special official statement from Thom about the film and what it's meant to him to work on it. Everything below is mostly "spoiler-free," but in actuality it's also pretty much impossible to truly "spoil" Road Diary. Like the best Springsteen concerts, even when you know what's coming next, it's still quite an awesome experience. We hope you get to enjoy it for yourself as soon and as often as possible:
Too late to stop now...
The Letters To You Review of Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
by Caroline Madden and Shawn Poole
"The road has taken a lot of the great ones," the late, great Robbie Robertson of The Band told Martin Scorsese in 1978's The Last Waltz, one of the best all-time rock-concert films. "Hank Williams... Buddy Holly... Otis Redding... Janis... Jimi Hendrix... Elvis.... It’s a goddamned impossible way of life... No question about it." In Thom Zimny's new film, Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Springsteen and his colleagues take a position on touring that's 180 degrees opposite to the one presented in The Last Waltz. "Since I was sixteen," says Bruce in his voiceover narration of the film, "playing live has been a deep and lasting part of who I am and how I justify my existence here on Earth...I plan on continuing until the wheels come off, and for as long as the audience will follow me." And this perspective is being shared by the leader of a group of performers after having logged a half-century-and-still-counting of traveling that road together, as opposed to The Band's relatively short (but still great) sixteen years before burning out and calling it quits, never touring together in their original formation again.
It's that love of what live performance at its best can do, for both the performers and the audience, that helped to sustain Springsteen's long-delayed touring plans through the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic. "When the world shut down," narrates Bruce in Road Diary, "I made a promise that if we got through this, I'd throw the biggest party I could."
We were both there, along with thousands of other fans, on the first night that long-awaited party finally began to happen. We remember how the energy of Amalie Arena in Tampa, Florida on February 1, 2023 was buzzing. It felt as if the entire audience was collectively holding our breaths for the first time Bruce Springsteen would appear on stage in concert with the E Street Band since 2017. In a flash, seven years had gone by since The River 2016 tour and its related early-January "Summer '17" tour Down Under, and COVID-19 had turned the world upside down, pushing back Springsteen's plans for a world tour after the release of his 2020 album Letter to You. While the 2021 revival of Springsteen on Broadway certainly did more than just satiate us, we were all craving that invigorating E Street Band sound again.
In Road Diary, for the first time, we are able to see and hear how the E Street Band felt about their triumphant return. Director Thom Zimny gets right inside the trust circle the band forms before the show, and in their beaming smiles and tight grips on each other's hands, we can see they were just as thrilled. The director seamlessly integrates Springsteen’s blistering first performance of “No Surrender” that night. This opening song reassured the audience that no matter what happens, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band will endure. While the "static" set list has drawn some contention among fans throughout the tour, Road Diary crystallizes Springsteen’s choices and gives us an intimate glimpse into his rehearsal process, setlist curation, and performances.
Zimny is a very humanistic director, often using techniques like close-ups, juxtaposition, and slow-motion to soak in the tiny details about someone or remind us of the fragility of time—a theme that has been so prevalent on this tour. While other filmmakers might try to match Bruce Springsteen’s manic performing energy, Zimny uses his very patient and observant camera to capture the introspective depth of Bruce’s work. The slow-motion images of Bruce’s fluid movements conducting the band almost look like a dance. In the rise of his shoulder or the lift of a finger, we can see something magical in the unspoken connection that has developed between him and his band over the past fifty years.
Recently, Zimny also spoke with us at length about the filmmaking techniques he utilized and the directorial choices he made for Road Diary. It's a great half-hour conversation, touching upon many aspects of making the film, including the development, importance, and unique role of Springsteen's voiceover narration, how and why Zimny filmed fans the way he did, how he and his crew went about the groundbreaking filming of Bruce's rehearsals with the E Street Band, why Zimny also considers Road Diary "my favorite deep dive into the vault," the invaluable contribution of Ron Aniello's score, and even Zimny's and Jon Landau's reactions to Bruce quoting Jim Morrison! Check out our special podcast conversation with Thom Zimny about Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, available for listening on our SoundCloud and YouTube platforms, and embedded below:
When Springsteen names the songs he wants to include on the setlist, Zimny includes related clips or photographs. In smooth, quick succession, we shift from thoughtful, black-and-white close-ups of Springsteen’s weathered face, the serious expressions of the teenage band The Castiles, and iconic moments from concerts at Slane Castle, Hammersmith Odeon, and "No Nukes." In an instant, we witness the evolution of an artist—a fifty-year journey of loving and sharing music that Bruce Springsteen has traveled from his days as a young man to a 75-year-old contemplating his own mortality. It’s a brief but beautiful sequence that articulates how much the passage of time is important on this tour.
Zimny often uses slow-motion to focus on certain audience members—men, women, children, lovers, and friends—gazing up at Bruce with such reverence. He captures exactly what it’s like to go to a Bruce Springsteen concert. Whenever we watch him with the band, time seems to stop; we know that someday we’ll be nostalgic for this amazing moment that’s happening right now, so we try to take it all in. By taking the time to observe the fans’ faces in Road Diary, we are able to see the fruits of Bruce Springsteen’s labor, how he makes the drudgery of everyday life melt away, lifting his audience up into a state of pure bliss.
Ghosts of family and friends past haunt this tour and Springsteen’s latest works, such as the Letter to You album, Springsteen on Broadway, and his autobiography, Born to Run. He has become increasingly reflective about the past and what his legacy will be. As we in the audience grow older, too, many of Bruce’s songs come into sharper focus for us. Simultaneously, hearing the voices of this tour's "newbies" - Anthony Almonte, Ada Dyer, and Ozzie Melendez - sharing their experiences of their first-ever full-scale tour with Springsteen, combined with the perspectives of newer, younger fans, reminds us that this music retains such strong, powerful legs to travel far, wide, deep, and into the future. With the past continuing to fade into the rearview mirror, we know that Springsteen and his collaborators still can remain our beloved traveling companions along the way.
Ultimately, what Thom Zimny and his filmmaking team have captured with Road Diary greatly deepens our appreciation for the privilege of sharing this time on Earth with Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band. How lucky we are to experience this journey together, “until the wheels come off.”
Oh, and by the way, there's one more thing that connects Road Diary to The Last Waltz... With Road Diary, just as with The Last Waltz, it's best to follow the advice in the latter film's opening-titles card: “THIS FILM SHOULD BE PLAYED LOUD!”
All photos/stills above are courtesy of Hulu/Disney+, and are used with permission.
