Blinded by the Light (2019)

Blinded by the Light arrives in 1987 Luton, a town that Margaret Thatcher's economic weather has left damp and contracting. Gurinder Chadha directs a British-Pakistani teenager named Javed through the familiar corridors of a coming-of-age picture, and she fills those corridors with a predominantly South Asian cast and a specificity of place that does not apologize for itself. The National Front marches. A pig's head is nailed to a mosque. Javed's father, laid off after sixteen years at Vauxhall, sells his wife's dowry jewellery to fund a wedding. The film treats this material with an earnestness that occasionally tips into sermon, though most critics found the sermon tolerable, even charming.

The racial and class grievances here are not subtext. They are the text, printed on the front page of the local paper and recited in speeches about bridges and walls. Thatcher-era austerity lends the picture a faint economic complaint, though the anger aims at circumstance and dignity, not at capital as such. A woman directs, and several women hold the screen with some authority, but the emotional engine is a father and a son, and the film knows it.

What the film declines to do is instructive. There is no queer thread. There is no environmental grievance. Nobody discusses body image or neurodivergence, and the historical record is left largely unrevised. What remains is a modest, sincere picture about Springsteen, ambition, and the cost of leaving home, which is a great deal more than most August releases can manage. It wants to move us, and it mostly does, without demanding that we file a report afterward.

{"thematic_tags": ["true_story", "book_adaptation"]}