Western Stars

This 2019 concert film, co-directed by Thom Zimny and Bruce Springsteen, plays the album of the same name straight through with an orchestra in a hundred-year-old barn on Springsteen's New Jersey property. Short essays in Springsteen's own voice sit between the songs: on ageing, on masculinity, on the cost of an obsession with self-sufficiency and what it does to a family. Those passages are what separate the film from an ordinary performance record. The visual language leans on the album's imagery of the American West and sometimes looks too clean, too lit. Against that, Patti Scialfa's presence and the plainness of the duets produce the film's most honest moments. That this was the first time Springsteen sat in the director's chair explains how personal the tone is. Who it's for: Springsteen listeners and viewers who like the form of a musician talking about his own life. Who it's not for: anyone expecting a band rock concert, or who will find the spoken passages overly composed and slow.