Bruce Springsteen Reckons with Mortality

C reating and sustaining the character called “Bruce Springsteen” has been a 50-year project of Bruce Springsteen, and an immensely successful one. But at 71, the myth of Springsteen stands to one side as the man himself faces the same truth facing all of us, the one from which no amount of celebrity can protect him. From 1965 to 1968, as a teenager, Springsteen was a member of a starter rock band, the Castiles. In Bruce Springsteen: Letter to You, an affecting new documentary on Apple TV+, he notes with a combination of sadness and resignation, but not surprise, that he is now the only living member of the quintet following the death of bandmate George Theiss in 2018, at age 68. “What can I say?” Springsteen tells the members of the E Street Band in a toast at the end of the film. “We’re taking this thing till we’re all in a box, boys.”

Filmed in a frank black and white by Springsteen’s frequent collaborator, director Thom Zimny, Letter to You chronicles the hasty recording of the album of the same name, lashed together and recorded live in just four days at Springsteen’s home studio in rural New Jersey last November. The musicians are piled atop one another, mostly in the same room, with Springsteen doing his vocals and guitar work in a booth and directing the band to create the sound he has in his head. “No foot yet,” he tells drummer Max Weinberg, meaning he should hold off on the bass drum. It’s the first album Springsteen has ever recorded in this manner, rough and ready.

Springsteen has nothing left to prove but a few things left to say. This “burning need to communicate,” he says, is “there when I wake every morning. It walks alongside me throughout the day.” What drives it? “Is it loneliness, ambition, hunger, ego, desire, a need to be felt and heard, recognized? All of the above.” He says his need to talk to us is as certain as the beating of his own heart, and though he usually speaks to us in character, he is a bit more revealing on this occasion.

None of the album’s new songs is likely to make anyone forget “Badlands” or “Thunder Road,” but they make up a solid week’s work. More important to the movie are the (slightly canned-sounding) speeches with which Springsteen introduces each song as Zimny fills things out with elegant photography of the woods around the studio, stills and home movies from the Boss’s early days, and glimpses of the men and women in the studio as they create the album. “Last Man Standing” reflects on being the sole survivor of the Castiles. “The Power of Prayer,” startlingly, suggests rock as a substitute for religion. Springsteen was raised Catholic, attended Catholic school, and walked away from the Church after eighth grade. But “once you’re a Catholic, you’re always a Catholic,” he allows in his autobiography. “I don’t participate in my religion, but I know somewhere . . . deep inside . . . I’m still on the team.” Yet in Letter to You, he says, “We all have our own ways of praying. I restricted my prayers to three minutes of a 45 RPM record . . . life in 180 seconds or less. If you get it right, it has the power of prayer.” Maybe. But this sounds a bit facile for a man who, later in the film, speaks beautifully of the ecstasy of living and does so knowing that he stands under a watchful eye. Age brings the clarity of standing on the train tracks at midnight, staring at the lights of an oncoming train, he says. His reflections are worth quoting at length:

It dawns on you rather quickly, there’s only so much time left. Only so many star-filled nights, snowfalls, brisk fall afternoons, rainy midsummer days. So how you conduct yourself and do your work matters. How you treat your friends, your family, your lover. On good days, a blessing falls over you. It wraps its arms around you and you’re free and deeply in and of this world. That’s your reward: being here. That’s what gets you up the next morning. A new chance to receive that benediction while you’re buttering your toast. . . . You stumble into those moments when you feel the hand of God gently rest upon your shoulder and you realize how lucky you are, lucky to be alive, lucky to be breathing in this world of beauty, horror and hope. . . . Go, and may God bless you.

Elsewhere in the film, Springsteen says, “We’ve not been made perfect by God but here,” in the recording studio, “I try to speak in the voice of my better angels.” The notion of rock as a stand-in for prayer appears to be mostly a marketing gimmick, not something Springsteen actually believes.

The camaraderie in the film seems a bit forced — Springsteen tells us the bandmates are his “friends,” but they seem more like his employees, and the many scenes of everyone passing around shot glasses feel made for the camera, like a laddish interlude from a commercial for a Ford F-150 or Levi’s jeans. Solemnly, Springsteen intones, “A rock band is a social unit based on the premise that all of us together are greater than the sum of our individual parts. . . . Together, higher ground awaits.” That’s a bit vapid. More detail about the creative process, and fewer mystical Stratocaster sermons, would have made for a more interesting and honest movie. Instead, Springsteen’s long-standing tendency to take himself a bit too seriously keeps popping up. Retelling his own origin story for the umpteenth time, he says, “I felt I had a job to do, demons to vanquish, a world to claim, my world. . . . I felt that I was on the Earth for one thing and one thing only: to meet, confront, and confirm my destiny, to come out on that stage and change your life.” That sounds like five things.

Still, there are several standout moments, such as when Springsteen dusts off some songs he wrote in 1972, when he was still aping Bob Dylan, and does his best to put over too-groovy-by-half lyrics such as, “The holy ghost is the host with the most, and he runs a burlesque show.” He’s able to have a laugh about this when recalling record mogul Clive Davis’s reaction to hearing his debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. “Someone had called [Davis] and told him if I wasn’t careful, I was going to use up the entire English language,” Springsteen recalls. “And he said that that was Bob Dylan.”

Springsteen leaves us with a sense that this might be it for him; he doesn’t seem tired, but the graceful helicopter shots over the snowy forest and his valedictory tone suggest he is aware more than ever before that any day could be his last. There’s a scene of him saying goodbye to his band. For how long? Not very long, I hope. But his final thoughts in the film give me reason to wonder: “Someday we will close our eyes and the gray evening sky will unfold above us, bringing that long and endless sleep.” Even a rock god must bow to mortality.