In the Hulu Original Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, director Thom Zimny follows the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and the members of his veteran band as they mount their first major tour since before the pandemic. Early rehearsals work out the kinks, Bruce builds a setlist out of new material, no-doubt bangers, and quieter reflections on his own mortality, and pretty soon they’re all out there road dogging it, just like they did 50 years before. “Since I was 16,” Springsteen says in Road Diary, “playing live has been a deep and lasting part of who I am. It’s how I justify my existence here on Earth.”
The Gist: Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band, which now comes complete with additional horns and supporting vocalists, are currently in the middle of a six-leg world tour that isn’t scheduled to quit until 2025. But as Road Diary begins in 2022, it’s with amazement that it’s been six years since they toured, and five since they were even in the same room together. Letter to You, Springsteen’s 20th studio album, was recorded in 2019. But the shows that would have supported it were blown out by the rise of COVID-19. As cameras capture them gathering in Red Bank, New Jersey for initial tour rehearsals, drummer Max Weinberg takes note of the re-acclimation process. “It became fairly apparent that we were playing everything extremely slow. We played ‘She’s the One’ so slow, it was a ballad.”
Road Diary is immersed in these early preparations, with footage from those rehearsals as well as voiceovers from Springsteen himself that illuminate his methods and intentions when creating the all-important live setlist. This guy has over five decades of his own music to choose from, plus a veteran band that doubles as a set of encyclopedias to interpret the 20th century American songbook. But as the set is hammered out, it’s with a strong emphasis on road-testing the new material, the highlight of songs that explore life, memory, and mortality, and of course a roller coaster finale full of towering Boss classics. It takes four hours of sweat and fun and soul and excitement to reach the release of “Born to Run.”
While its Bruce voiceovers are revealing, the interviews in Road Diary largely focus on the rest of the E Streeters, which is an effective way to sketch their internal dynamic, interpersonally as well as in performance. And everybody in the band keeps returning to one big point. From core crew originals like Weinberg, Patti Scialfa, Stevie Van Zandt, and Roy Bittan, to E Street’s newer percussionists and vocalists, the word is this: When you’re on stage with Bruce Springsteen, all your practice and preparation are forever in service of whatever pivots their frontman wishes to make in the moment. “It takes a lot of thought and detailing to make it all look tight on stage,” Weinberg says in Road Diary, “and to be spontaneous at the same time.”
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Road Diary director Thom Zimny is a longtime collaborator of Bruce Springsteen’s, having helmed the award-winning 2018 film Springsteen on Broadway, which streams on Netflix, as well as Wings for Wheels: The Making of Born to Run (Paramount+). And the recent Max doc Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple is a celebration of Springsteen’s longtime musical right hand and consigliere.
Performance Worth Watching: On any given night, the set is packed with requisite heavy hitters. But Road Diary really shines with a sequence that highlights the impact of a somewhat unexpected cover song: Bruce and the band’s tender, soulful, and rousing take on the Commodores’ 1985 hit “Night Shift,” which is performed in tribute to the bandmembers E Street lost.
Memorable Dialogue: Bruce is at his most philosophical in the voiceovers that surface throughout Road Diary. “I’ve always believed the audience does not pay necessarily to hear their favorite song or to see your aging face again, but they pay for the intensity of your presence, how alive you are on any given evening. That’s the beating heart of my job. To be there and only there, playing for all the stakes rock ‘n’ roll has to offer for you, in your town, on this night.”
Sex and Skin: Well, nothing. But this is rock ‘n’ roll music we’re talking about, and Bruce Springsteen knows how to write a lyric full of longing, abandon, sex, and crazy heat. “We kiss, my heart rushes through my brain…the fire rushes toward the sky…I go driving deep into the light in Candy’s eyes…”
Our Take: “Each tour rehearsal starts out in a small theater. We settle on the songs, we practice ‘em, we get the band in the groove. But then we move to a local arena to address the staging and the pace of the performance. What will the rhythm of the show be? The big room also lets you know that this will all very soon be real.”
Insights like this from Bruce Springsteen are a big part of what’s very cool about Road Diary. Because for as long as he and the E Street Band have been at this – the doc also includes just the right amount of archival footage and biographical boilerplate – they still have to practice hard like any garage band there ever was, and fully commit to developing the sound and feeling that will guide them on stage. For a group who have been around this long, it’s surely true that these thoughts have been shared in docs before. But Road Diary is great at coalescing them, including all of the voices in the room – pretty much every E Streeter is interviewed, including the newer players – and connecting those thoughts and observations about process to Bruce and E Street’s particular kinetic energy, as they perform on stages across the world.
Our Call: Stream It! There is no shortage of Bruce Springsteen documentary material, and his live show is already legendary. But Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band offers Boss heads and new fans alike an insightful portrait of a working rock ‘n’ roll band, with a good balance between the live stuff and the consideration of what it takes to keep doing it, year after year and night after night.
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.