Review of Blinded by the Light

Coming of age film about a young Pakistani Muslim boy growing up in Luton, whose passage into adulthood is eased by the songs of Bruce Springsteen. He's a thoughtful, creative sort of boy, who has been writing poems since childhood, and he's lucky to find an encouraging English teacher at his six form college. He's lucky to have a supportive, anti-racist friend next door who sticks up for him, and for the glum looking older white neighbour to be a sympathetic ex-soldier with anti-Nazi convictions. And for the cute activist girl in his English class to fancy him. And to have a new Sikh mate who introduces him to Springsteen. There's a long period in the middle of the film which is just too feel-good, when everything seems to be going right; I can't help feeling the film would have been better and tighter if it had been 30 minutes shorter.

Much of the drama centres on the relationship between the young man and his dad, who wants the best for him but also wants him to be dutiful and obedient, even though (as his mum points out) the dad himself came to Britain despite his own parents' wishes. There's enough tension to make this interesting. In fact, I've noticed that coming of age films often seem to have an Asian family background, because they can support that kind of family dynamic in a way that seems implausible in a mainstream Western family. Interestingly the dad tells the boy to follow the Jews, because they have the right kind of ambition and ethnic solidarity; as a kid, in an earlier time, my dad would tell me that Asian families were like us, so it went both ways.

There's some nice depictions of anti-fascist political action in the late 1980s (though I suspect that most of the impetus had gone out of the National Front by then); I can identify with that more than I can with the Springsteen adulation. I like 'Born to Run, but I can't help preferring the Frankie Goes to Hollywood version.

Watched on Amazon Prime via Chromecast.