Once this filmmaker landed on Planet Bruce, there was no escape

NEW YORK - In a small black-box theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, where Bruce Springsteen has been rehearsing for an upcoming international tour, the hardest-working rock star to strap on a Fender decides to call it a day. “King, I’m going home,” Springsteen informs Jon Landau, his longtime producer-manager.

Appearing startled, Landau greets the news with a slightly quizzical look, followed by a diplomatic “Uhm …”

It’s a fleeting encounter in Thom Zimny’s new documentary “Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band,” about the tour that ensued in 2023 and continues to this day. But in its candor and intimacy, it’s a moment that contains multitudes. After more than two decades observing and collaborating with Springsteen and Landau, Zimny instantly recognized it as an example of “the secret language between the two of them,” a lexicon based on mutual taste, singular focus, obsessive attention to specifics and - when needed - making space to ask, “You sure, Boss?,” if only with a meaningful pause.

“If I didn’t have 24 years with them, I wouldn’t see the beauty in those details,” Zimny said last month at the downtown Manhattan editing facility where he, Landau and Springsteen worked on key sequences of “Road Diary.” “It would [just] be, ‘They’re having a conversation, and Bruce wants to end early.’”

What Zimny calls the “silent brotherhood” between Springsteen and the right-hand man he calls King isn’t the only hidden world revealed in “Road Diary,” which launches Friday on Hulu and Disney Plus. As the chronicle of the first E Street Band tour since 2017, the film documents creative partnerships - between Springsteen and his musicians, as well as with Landau - that are among the most prolific and enduring in rock and roll. Filming fans in “the pit” at E Street concerts throughout the world, Zimny deftly conveys the ecstatic experience of seeing Springsteen’s live performances, legendary for their unbridled energy, electrifying showmanship and, at three-plus hours, epic running times. Also, more than any previous Springsteen film, “Road Diary” pulls back the veil on the creation of those shows, which he calls “a deep and lasting part of who I am and how I justify my existence here on Earth.”

But the most surprising thing about “Road Diary” might be how, amid the exhilaration and catharsis, the film manages to weave in more reflective themes of mortality, loss and the inexorability of time. Delayed three years by the covid pandemic, the current tour was originally scheduled to support 2020′s “Letter to You,” an album that found Springsteen, who recently turned 75, wistfully reflecting on his past. Like the record, the show includes moving shout-outs to Springsteen’s very first group, the Castiles, as well as founding E Street members Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons, who died in 2008 and 2011, respectively. “Road Diary” makes no mention of band members’ bouts of covid and Springsteen’s own ulcer condition that led to several shows being canceled, but at one point in the film, Springsteen’s wife, Patti Scialfa, explains that she hasn’t been touring as much in recent years because she has been diagnosed with multiple myeloma.

“There was no pre-discussion [that] we were going to go down that road,” Zimny said, explaining that some of his earliest projects were music videos for Scialfa’s solo projects. “There’s enormous trust there.” As for Springsteen’s presence in the film, the filmmaker made a counterintuitive choice to forgo a talking-head interview, instead recording him reading a journal-like narration. The result is a celebratory and sobering portrait of a performer who has spent his entire career playing every show as if it were his last, now preparing himself and his fans for the day when that metaphor becomes a reality.

Zimny, 59, calls “Road Diary” a film “24 years in the making,” referring to the rapport he’s built with Landau and Springsteen since first meeting them when he was editing the HBO documentary “Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band: Live in New York City.” Landau was particularly impressed by Zimny’s work on “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” an epic 19-minute version that doglegged into a cover of “Take Me to the River,” a tent-revival oration and band introductions, finally culminating in an iconic piece of stagecraft with Springsteen and Clemons. “The way Thom put that sequence together, that was one of the moments I knew he’s got a future here with us,” observed Landau. “Thom didn’t realize that he had been captured by Planet Bruce. And 20-some-odd years later here he is, doing the best work he’s ever done.”

Zimny was growing up in the New Jersey shore town of Point Pleasant, the son of a frequently unemployed construction worker, when he listened to Springsteen’s 1978 album “Darkness on the Edge of Town” for the first time. He was 13. “[That] was the first time music spoke to me so deeply,” he recalled, “because it was connecting a lot of details, images and people that were around me.” Five years later Zimny, who is dyslexic, created a homemade music video of “Born in the U.S.A.” using two clunky VCR decks, splicing together footage from a PBS Vietnam documentary and a local Memorial Day parade.

“All of a sudden, for the first time as a dyslexic, I put together a sentence,” Zimny said. “It’s not a sentence with words, it’s a sentence of images.”

With a new language at his fingertips, Zimny continued to edit, studying filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and working for the nonfiction production company New York Center for Visual History; in 2000 he was asked to replace an editor who had unexpectedly dropped out of cutting “Live in New York City,” which captured the final two concerts of an epic 10-day stand at Madison Square Garden the previous year.

Springsteen now acknowledges that documentary as a turning point in his relationship to film. Movies have always played an important role in his writing, from “Badlands,” the 1973 Terrence Malick true-crime drama that inspired both the song and his album “Nebraska,” to the film noir mood that infused “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” His final line in “Western Stars,” the 2019 documentary he co-directed with Zimny, is from one of his favorite films, “The Searchers.” But earlier in his career, Springsteen had what he calls an “aversion” to filming his stage and studio performances. “A magician doesn’t want [you] to look too closely at his magic trick,” Springsteen explained in a recent phone conversation, adding with a laugh, “As I got older, I started realizing, ‘Gee, we don’t have much film of the band. I wonder why.’”

Although he agreed to film his performances for the “Live in New York City” movie, that project had a rocky beginning. “It was the beginning of high-def,” Springsteen recalled, “or slow death, or whatever you want to call it.” Although “Live in New York City” had been recorded on state-of-the-art digital video, while it was being edited he was watching works in progress at home, on VHS. When he went to Manhattan to see the finished film on the big screen, he was shocked. “Something came on that I simply didn’t recognize.” He recalled turning to Zimny and saying, “Why am I looking at the guy in the 30th row with the Grateful Dead T-shirt on instead of the narrative that [we] are weaving onstage in this moment? Why am I studying the illuminant corner of the drum riser? There was an enormous amount of information, and a lot of it was unnecessary information.”

Zimny remembers when Springsteen told him what he wanted for “Live in New York City”: an “archival” look that would warm up the film’s pristine images. “He turned to me and said, ‘I made an album [”Nebraska”] on a cassette. I have no problem taking this and putting grain to it.’” Using digital tools available at the time, Zimny proceeded to add grain, texture and desaturation until the visual aesthetic met with Springsteen’s approval. “It was the beginning of us making a deal with ourselves,” Springsteen recalled, “saying, ‘Okay, if we can take all this care, we can start filming regularly.’ And that’s what we did.”

Until then, Springsteen had had an uneven experience with music videos (an aborted first attempt at the “Dancing in the Dark” music video is a famous disaster), which he chalks up to not having found a long-term partner on a par with such musical collaborators as Landau, Jimmy Iovine, Chuck Plotkin and Ron Aniello. “We didn’t have that in film until Thom Zimny came along. He was an enormous part of the puzzle.”

Zimny edited subsequent concert films of a 2003 show in Barcelona and a 1975 performance at London’s Hammersmith Odeon that had been shot and then stored away for nearly 30 years. By this time, he was an editor on the HBO series “The Wire” and working on the Springsteen project at night, syncing up the visual images song by song, using his firsthand experience with Springsteen’s stagecraft as a guide. “Just watching Clarence’s shoulders, I knew whether it was a riff from ‘Rosalita’ or ‘Jungleland,’” Zimny recalled.

In 2005 Zimny directed “Wings for Wheels,” about the making of “Born to Run” (no VCRs were harmed) using material shot by filmmaker Barry Rebo, who had filmed several concerts, rehearsals and studio sessions in the 1970s and early 1980s. That footage has become an essential building block of the Springsteen visual canon, which now encompasses more than a dozen feature-length films, thanks in large part to the mind meld Zimny has achieved with Springsteen and Landau. Make no mistake: These aren’t adversarial investigations (Springsteen and Landau are always listed as producers). But they’re not mere fan service either. Whereas most rock docs are content simply to document a performance or illustrate a song, Zimny’s films have become more densely layered extensions of Springsteen’s own storytelling - an accomplishment all the more impressive for the musician’s initial ambivalence about how to use film in his work.

To Landau, Zimny has achieved the filmmaking equivalent of the musicians in the E Street Band, who are so in the pocket that they’re “able to collaborate with Bruce wherever Bruce goes.” For Zimny, as rewarding as diving into the vault has been, “more important, to me is the filmmaking journey. How are we going to tell these stories? The beautiful thing Bruce said early on was, ‘There’s no “Born to Run II.”’ I’ve always used that as a reference. Each time we’re going to approach the story fresh.”

Most recently, and of a piece with what Springsteen calls a shared “emotional geography” with Zimny, that meant returning to their common roots in Freehold, New Jersey, to direct a video of the singer endorsing Kamala Harris for president. After Landau told him about the project, Zimny suggested filming at Roberto’s Freehold Grill, a diner Springsteen has been frequenting “since I was 5,” with his grandparents and parents, and on dates as a teenager. It’s also where Zimny interviewed him for the “Born to Run” documentary and shot the video for “Long Walk Home,” a song Springsteen has been introducing on tour as “a prayer for my country” (“Here everybody has a neighbor/ Everybody has a friend/ Everybody has a reason to begin again”).

Landau loved the idea. “I said, ‘We’ll put Bruce at the counter,’” he recalled. “And Thom said, ‘And the camera will be the friend he’s talking to.’ It was a masterstroke.” For Zimny, the choice was an instinctive one, steeped in history he’s helped to both preserve and shape.

“I can never fully unpack a creative choice,” he noted. “I also believe in the mystery of mistakes. It’s something I’ve witnessed Bruce do in the studio and the live show. You get out of your own way, and something happens, and the story is told.”