Gaze Upon Western Stars: The Comfort, Cosmology, and Glimmer of Springsteen's Contemplative Concert Film
Tuesday, July 1, 2025 at 03:14PM
Western Stars
Directed by: Bruce Springsteen and Thom Zimny
Starring: Bruce Springsteen, Patti Scialfa
Release Date: October 19, 2019
Rated: PG (1 hour, 23 minutes)
Available on: Blu-ray, DVD, and digital on-demand platforms
Content Warning: This reflection includes explicit examples of anti-Black racism and white supremacy, particularly through quotations from John Wayne. It also engages with the enduring legacies of colonialism, pandemic-era public health policy, systemic ableism, and the fraught nature of contemporary American politics and nationalism.
Since the fall of 2019, I have been lingering in the beautifully lit, tastefully festooned hayloft of Bruce Springsteen’s barn in Colts Neck, New Jersey. I am neither a sinister intruder nor a marauding ghoul; I’m simply an invited guest, dropping in to enjoy the resilient twilight of Western Stars.
Western Stars is a constellation: the intricacies of songwriting, live performance, lighting, and revelatory camerawork converge to create a cozy, accessible, and immersive landmark concert film. Released during the initial waves of the still-present coronavirus heath crisis, Western Stars offers an enduring opportunity to examine the roughhewn borders between individual and community, advancement and rooted contentment.
Before the first note of the first album track featured in Western Stars, Springsteen harnesses the visual landscape and oratory power afforded to him as co-director. His voiceover guides the camera to the stage—to give the viewer a moment behind the mic—before flying into the rafters. The title card rolls. The first plucked melody twangs not from Bruce’s big cherry-red country guitar but from the sprightly banjo played by one of his assembled cadre of musicians. The attentive intermingling of visual language and refined song arrangements forms the firmament of Western Stars.
Consider, for instance, the first four songs featured in the film. “Hitch Hikin’” is bathed in cool cobalt backlight. The gradual ascent and gentle decline of a strummed banjo rises and falls with the hopes of the listless traveler Springsteen sings about. “The Wayfarer” is cloaked in a deep blue-black stage light—shadows withholding the imminent dawn—as a propulsive chord pattern faithfully conjures the hypnotic rhythm of highway travel. “Tucson Train” glows under the orange spotlight of dawn. The music bounds onward. Buoyed by strings, a rhythmic churn arrives. The clicking drums and spitting twang of Springsteen’s vocals are a perfect fit for an anxious rail worker awaiting the arrival of a lost love.
The marquee “Western Stars,” and their diminishing but still-present radiance, shimmer in the stage light of golden sunshine. Springsteen sings about departed legends and still-dynamic frontiers—the glory of which cannot be wholly compromised by nationalistic narrowmindedness—even as the giants of the silver screen and horizon are lost to the relentless passage of time. There is anguish in Springsteen’s eyes and voice as he propels through the quaking existentialism of failed relationships, contentious age, and the regretful sorrow that has always underpinned his most quixotic and memorable lovelorn characters. Even in the shadow of solemn stage light, these anthems of the formidable West retain an irrepressible sense of satisfaction at feats accomplished and lineages invoked.
Despite the earnestness and concentrated effort on display, one might be forgiven for thinking Western Stars is the peak of bland boomer idealism and artistic excess. The film is mostly shot in the barn of one of the last remaining septuagenarian rock superstars, complete with a 30-piece orchestra, background singers, banjo players, percussion, and occasional boisterous brass. The songs are supplemented by sweeping drone shots of horses roaming free in the vast California desert. These sequences are buttressed by a yearning, cinematic orchestral score composed by Springsteen and an unseen session orchestra—likely bolstered by a synthetic secret or two. Not satisfied, Springsteen adds further ornateness through carefully articulated voiceovers that contextualize each song, drawing thematic corollaries to his previous work and to his California pop idols. He delivers monologues directly to the camera, exercising muscles honed on the Broadway stage. As such, a certain largesse—and the glistening illusory exceptionalism of the Great American West—are unmistakably present. Some viewers might find this amount to too much finery, too little substance.
There are certainly anachronistic touchups in the landscape and soundscape of Western Stars’ celluloid crinkle. These moments do not reckon with—or even engage—the craven past of imperialism or the present-day ramifications of that spikiness. At times, the filmmaking and songwriting can feel clumsy or stale. The protagonist in the song “Western Stars” recalls a brief encounter with an aged John Wayne. Wayne is a reasonable reference point for the evoked era, but he was also a toxic, combative racist—openly expressing white supremacist views and endorsing genocidal conquest in his infamous 1971 Playboy interview with Richard Warren Lewis.
PLAYBOY: Angela Davis claims that those who would revoke her teaching credentials on ideological grounds are actually discriminating against her because she's black. Do you think there's any truth in that?
WAYNE: With a lot of blacks, there's quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can't all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.[1]
and
WAYNE: I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them, if that's what you're asking. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.[2]
[1] G Barry Golson. 1981. The Playboy Interview. [Vol. 1]. New York: Wideview Books Pg. 268
[2.] G Barry Golson. 1981. The Playboy Interview. [Vol. 1]. New York: Wideview Books Pg. 269
John Wayne’s legacy is not one of a sterling silver screen hero whose mythos should still be read as luminous. One might hope Springsteen could have referenced that mythology in a way that acknowledged its mythic fragility—or used it as commentary on how narrative nobility often requires us to bury our heroes’ revolting flaws. Instead, Western Stars leans into simple iconography. When Springsteen dons a cowboy hat and engages in saddle work, underscored by a swooning orchestral score, the implication is reverence: Wayne as diminished yet remarkable symbol of rugged greatness.
So too does the ecstatic whirl of “Sleepy Joe’s Café,” anchored as it is by the post–World War II G.I. Bill, invoke an idealistic boon mostly reserved for white members of the Armed Forces. By contrast, the 21st-century G.I. Bills—passed in the fraught aftermath of the “War on Terror”—are contentious and arguably inadequate, lacking the generational fortune of their predecessors. The jubilant accordion two-step of “Sleepy Joe’s Café,” set in a quaint corner of San Bernardino, does not spare breath for introspection or modern parallels.
Still, Western Stars contains awe, awash in technicolor. Its thematic simplifications and buffered edges might disappoint those familiar with the grit of The Ghost of Tom Joad or Devils & Dust. The former chronicles dust-bowl desperation and porous borders; the latter contends with the haunted margins of post-9/11 warfare. And yet, even a film that is insufficiently radical can spark critical thinking, reveal virtuosity, and glint with verisimilitude.
Art’s impact often transcends its intent. And for me—for the jagged frontiers of my harangued psyche—Western Stars became a site of regenerative solace. It was a gathering space, a sanctuary built from the sparkle of shared performance. A technicolor barn that dared its viewer to stay a while.Western Stars had a short theatrical run in October 2019, as whispers of a pandemic coalesced into a guttural alarm. As health officials pleaded for prudence—thwarted by market appetites to “return to normal”—the film appeared on HBO Max: a pastiche of bespoke timelessness, released when it was most needed.
Yes, Western Stars is, as Springsteen says, “a 13-song meditation on the struggle between individual freedom and communal life.” The hitchhikers, cowboys, hopeful songwriters, horse wranglers, stuntmen, and faded background players of Hollywoodland are classic Springsteen characters: the horizon offers as much dread as it does joy.
Take, for example, “Chasin’ Wild Horses” and “Stones”:
A fingernail moon in a twilight sky
I’m ridin’ in the high grass of the switchback
I shout your name into the canyon
The echo throws it back
Chasin’ wild horses
and
I woke up this morning with stones in my mouth
You said those are only the lies you’ve told me
Those are only the lies you’ve told me
Loneliness and deception are out there—on the flipside, and backside, of imagined freedom. Escaping those boomerangs is impossible, even in the most unrestrained moments of joy. Nostalgia offers only shallow escape. But love—flourishing, co-extensive, ever-elusive—remains the worthiest pursuit. Or, as a Springsteen voiceover offers:
“Love is one of the only miracles God has given us daily proof of this earth and while we do our best to disprove this idea, love is there to better us. But you must work for its blessings. Love and creative life it births is a small, sweet sign of God’s divinity within us”
In the film’s second half, that kind of love radiates most clearly through Springsteen’s duets with his wife, Patti Scialfa. The barn sheds its identity as concert hall and becomes something warmer—a hearth, aglow with memory and devotion. “Stones” and “Moonlight Motel”—once bleak portraits of emptiness—now shine with companioned resilience. Each musician, each crewmember, stitches their own thread into the reverie. The audience—tucked close, cinematically embraced—is invited to surrender to the quiet magnificence of the moment.
Western Stars includes so many subtle but profound embellishments that it has become the definitive way to experience the album. It stands out even among Springsteen’s many excellent live recordings, filmed performances, and behind-the-scenes documentaries.It’s a monumental achievement for Springsteen—the songwriter and director—to warn the audience of his intention to make some magic and then pull off the trick. He merrily casts a spell, twirls in the trappings of cliché, and still inscribes a new legend into the starry sky.
As I conclude this reflection, it is July of 2025. The widespread aspects of the coronavirus pandemic have receded somewhat—for some, for now. The long-term consequences of so much disruption and hostility remain unknowable. Newly appointed public health officials have rejected long-standing, evidence-based methods for managing public health crises. These officials seem to prioritize individual autonomy (for some) over the shared responsibility to mitigate harm through vaccines, public conduct, and other interventions that best protect high-risk populations. At the same time, an eagerness to extend the dominion and domination of the United States in every conceivable direction has reemerged.
Given these trends, I am reminded that art is not—and cannot be—the sole corrective to the shortcomings of a restrictive, reckless, and corrosive national imagination. Nor is transcendent artistry a substitute for concrete political aspirations and action. Those most complicit in oppressive violence will always find a way to cast themselves as the noble, downtrodden heroes of the songs: justified in whatever they deem necessary to defend their perceived providential liberty.
The romanticism of the perpetual horizon tends to flatten disturbing realities. The itinerant Mexican charros—warmly identified in Western Stars as “our American brothers”—would likely be targeted as invaders by a sizable portion of the American electorate and government. Still, some fans and critics have positioned Springsteen as an artist whose work implicitly points toward possibilities for a better liberty—one secured through shared action, not just solitary longing.
America is a group project. The nation cannot be redeemed by the efforts of an incisive songwriter, nor can it be doomed by a political leader who enthusiastically invokes the brutal tactics of a blustering strongman. Rather, America is actualized by everyone living within it. Voters, activists, elected officials, and government workers shape policy. Everyone else contends with how to treat those in their chosen community—whom they might render aid and affection to—and those who may fall outside that scope. The parameters of political prioritization thus emerge: Who matters? Which groups of people residing in or alongside America—or seeking to do so—deserve attention, care, protection, and access to the shared resources that make life enjoyably livable?
Springsteen’s songcraft endures precisely because his flawed characters and memorable settings are so vivid. Perhaps this descriptive vitality can remain illuminating and captivating for an audience filled with people who hold competing—and arguably irreconcilable—sociopolitical priorities. Springsteen can only control his craft, intentions, and actions—the misappropriation of which is always lurking. Worse, he could become convinced that he is, in fact, the salvific troubadour of the American soul.
Springsteen has returned to touring and made his frustration with the present political moment clear. He routinely delivers pre-song speeches that contextualize his choice to perform certain tracks as direct commentary on the corrupt cruelty of current political leadership.
In-person concert attendance has also returned to a manageable level of endemic safety and risk for me. I saw Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band live on March 23, 2023. It was magnificent. As I expected, none of the Western Stars songs were played. The concert film remains the only performance of the album—and I hope it stays that way
Yes, the concert film can be an individual and insular experience—but that doesn't make this type of concert any less remarkable or precious. As a wheelchair-using person, the frontlines of concerts—replete with frenzied, ecstatic standing-room stalls and impenetrable waves of outstretched arms—have always been, and will likely remain, decidedly inaccessible to me.
The Western Stars film provides the straightforward immediacy I've always craved in my concert attendance. I hope artists continue to use the concert film as an opportunity to craft an artistically arresting presentation of filmed performance. The afterglow of Bruce Springsteen’s Western Stars will remain a kaleidoscopic orientation for my future concert film experiences.
If you have never watched "Western Stars", make a rental or purchase. I'll save you a seat in the barn.
Buy Western Stars Blu-ray | GRUV
Watch Western Stars | Prime Video
Directed by Bruce Springsten and Thom Zinny
Starring Bruce Springsteen, Patti Scalfa
RatedL PG
Runtime: 1 hour and 23 Mintues