You Don't Live Like I Do

Bruce Springsteen is a superstar. With five albums under his belt with the E Street Band, his first top 10 single in "Hungry Heart", and a hugely successful tour for album "The River", he's on the brink of global megastardom. The press, the public and his record label are hungry for more.

Bruce Springsteen is a mess. Haunted by memories of his childhood poverty and his violent alcoholic father, he repeatedly finds himself parked outside the now-empty Freehold NJ house where he grew up. He has had a string of girlfriends, but can't bring himself to commit to a relationship. In an isolated lakeside house in Colt's Neck, he records demos on an early four-track. He finds himself obsessed with spree killer Charles Starkweather who killed 11 people in Nebraska, and writes about people disconnected from society, from family, from community. The songs are deeply personal, stripped down... and entirely uncommercial.

This is the setting for the film "Deliver Me From Nowhere". Rather than your standard rock biopic, a greatest hits jukebox charting an artist or band's career from start to the present, this is a focused character piece about a man on the brink of despair, nearly lost to depression, trying to find meaning in the noise all around him. There are few hit songs in this film. We get a small piece of "Born To Run" performed at the end of his tour, and we hear the E Street Band working on an early version of what will eventually become "Born In The USA". But mostly we have the echoey acoustic guitar, harmonica and semi-mumbled vocals of "Nebraska".

We focus on his inner turmoil, how he fails to cope with a fling that's turning serious and putting him into a parental role, while still managing to play in Asbury Park at the Stone Pony club, where performing on stage serves as a distraction from his reality. We focus on his relationship with his father, mostly in the form of flashbacks. Matthew Anthony Pellicano Jr who plays Bruce as a child is incredible, the black and white film turning his eyes into black pits as he warily interacts with his drunken father, played brilliantly by Stephen Graham. And the adult Springsteen is captured by Jeremy Allen White in an amazing performance. The acting, direction and cinematography is all top-notch. It's a joy to watch the film, despite its heavy subject matter.

( But... )

One of the things that confuses me about this film is who it's for, other than cosmolinguist. It's been getting huge amounts of promotion, from bus adverts to the stars appearing on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show, most of whose listeners are far too young to have heard of Bruce Springsteen. And this film isn't a great introduction to Springsteen as a person, or his music - "Nebraska" is now considered a great work, but it was "Born in the USA", the album after it, which propelled him to stardom. Jeremy Allen White said that the only way he could make the film was to portray a rock star struggling with depression and recording a bleak album who just happened to be Bruce Springsteen. And on that basis they did a great job, but I expect that sort of film to be a smaller indie release. I'll be interested to see how the box office numbers work out for this, because I expect it to be a critically acclaimed financial bomb. In this way the movie seems to mirror the album itself, and I'm really hoping that nobody claims this is a deliberate irony...

(I was also slightly sad that there wasn't a post-credits scene where Timothée Chalamet's Bob Dylan is waiting for Bruce in a hotel room to recruit him to the Dad Rock Avengers.)

This week I saw two films as part of Scene Festival, a queer film festival that's run alongside Manchester Pride. The first was an outdoor screening of To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar, the other classic mainstream 90s drag film that isn't Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Me and cosmolinguist hadn't seen it before. It was an outdoor screening, which was great pandemic-wise; we got there just after the screening started, and most of the deck chairs facing the screen were occupied, but we grabbed a picnic table behind them which was better for holding the pints we grabbed from the bar at Home.

The film's plot is reasonably simple - three drag queens are driving across country from New York to LA, and their car breaks down in a small town. They must stay until a spare part arrives, facing hostility from some of the locals, including a murderous sheriff. It includes threatened and actual sexual assault and domestic violence. But it's a light-hearted comedy, and a fantasy - it doesn't try to be realistic or gritty, and is based around how the locals are inspired and have their lives turned around by the queens. Despite for being a comedy, the girls themselves are never the butt of any queer-phobic jokes. And it's actually really well shot, and acted - Wesley Snipes and Patrick Swayze were known as an action hero and a romantic lead at the time, but they play their parts well. John Leguizamo was a bit more experienced in drag through his stand up comedy at the time and that shows.

There's a description of the difference between cross-dressers, transvestites, transsexuals and drag queens which doesn't stand up well, but was not a bad explanation for mainstream audiences in the mid-1990s. It's definitely a period piece in other ways too - the cops can be the butt of jokes and manage to be a threat without being too dangerous or over-militarised, and there's no mobile phones for a break down or sat nav for the road trip. Definitely worth watching though, with enough camp and kitschy moments to spice it up.

The night after, me and P went to Cultplex to see Bottoms, a high school sex comedy with several twists. The first of which is the queerness - our protagonists are two lesbian virgins, about to graduate high school and both crushing on popular cheerleaders. As they make clear, people don't hate them because they're gay, they hate them because they're "gay, ugly and untalented". They live in a small town where high school football is worshipped to a ridiculously over the top and camp degree, including the football team having a one-sided table at one end of the school cafeteria where they sit like The Last Supper.

After an incident at the start of term, bolstered by some runaway rumours, our girls set up a women's self defence class at the school, run like Fight Club, with the ultimate goal of getting laid. The club takes off in an unexpected direction and the girls ride their success for a while before it comes crashing down, right before the Homecoming Game. Can they get the gang back together, save the football team and get the girls?

This was a "party screening" where audience participation was encouraged, which meant people whooping whenever people beat each other up or girls made out. I was sad to have missed this film in cinemas but seeing it for the first time among a group of noisy queers was actually brilliant fun. It's not a subtle film - the girls' teacher asks on the blackboard "who invented feminism? Gloria Steinem, some other woman, or a man?" and there are lots of snarky inside jokes for queers and feminists alike. I can't recommend it enough if you want silly, over the top and surprisingly gory fun.

I saw the trailer for this film in the cinema and it looked interesting, but not enough to justify the risk of a trip during these pandemic times. So I was happy when it landed on a streaming service I have access to. It's a nice little exorcism themed movie, and obviously draws from a lot of the classic movies in that genre, but manages to put a few twists on it.

( Spoilers )