Springsteen & I

The documentary is not about Bruce Springsteen but about the people who listen to him. The producers asked fans all over the world to send footage they had shot themselves, and a film was built out of the thousands of clips that came in. People talk in cars, in kitchens, in the queue for a concert: which song, which year, what had happened. Springsteen himself appears only on stage. Baillie Walsh's film neither mocks fan culture nor exalts it. Most of what gets told is not about music: a separation, a death, a stretch of unemployment, and the song being played at the time. The film also carries concert footage from the last tour. What comes out is a document of how a musician got into people's lives over forty years.