Roops is the guy who gave him the cassettes, by the way. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive,” he spits at three racist jerks who harass him and his friend Roops (Aaron Phagura) in a restaurant, and the racist jerks are too stunned to even respond.
#YOUTUBE BLINDED BY THE LIGHT MOVIE#
He will spend the rest of the movie speaking to almost everyone-his friends, his family, his supportive English teacher Miss Clay (Hayley Atwell), his girlfriend Eliza (Nell Williams)-exclusively in Springsteen lyrics, while wearing ’80s Springsteen garb (jean jacket + bandanna + sleeveless flannel), his bedroom festooned exclusively with Springsteen posters. Javed presses his hands to his headphones to keep it all in. As he cavorts in the storm, we flash back to everything Javed’s experienced in, uh, the first half-hour of the movie: The National Front racist who spits in his face, his father taking all the money from the part-time job Javed’s been working, etc. He switches to Darkness and cranks up “The Promised Land”: Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart. Snatches of lyrics appear right onscreen: Nothing but tired. and listen to his first Springsteen tune, “Dancing in the Dark,” and suddenly he is having a very intense and explicitly religious experience. It is this fraught moment when Javed decides to pop in Born in the U.S.A. One stormy night a distraught Javed takes all his handwritten poems and dumps them in the trash, only for the wind to swell and scatter the pages like so many crumpled but beautiful birds. And as anyone who has read Springsteen’s 510-page autobiography can tell you, there is no storytelling force more powerful than a Disapproving Father.
His father, Malik (Kulvinder Ghir), a stern laid-off factory worker who ties to keep his family afloat and insists that “writing is for rich people,” disapproves.
Javed wants a girlfriend, and to be a poet, and to secure a ticket out of the Southeast England nowheresville of Luton, the sort of darkness-edged town that rips the bones from your back.
Directed by Gurinder Chadha-entering her fourth decade in the industry and best known, at least stateside, for 2002’s Bend It Like Beckham-it stars Viveik Kalra as Javed Khan, a sullen 16-year-old of Pakistani descent. Blinded by the Light is a lightly dramatic and slightly musical-theaterish comedy about, and by, and explicitly for people who idolize the working-class hero known, paradoxically, as The Boss.