Movie Nation

“Hobbs & Shaw” are losing their steam, but still have another $24 million in them, a steep 60% drop from opening weekend.

That is enough to win this desultory box office race for Aug. 9-11.

“Dora” is underwhelming in terms of ticket sales, as I predicted. $16 and change.

But as I mentioned Friday, “Scary Stories” lured in Thursday night audiences and is heading towards a $20 million+ opening.

“The Kitchen” is barely clearing $5 million. Bad acting is just another sign of bad directing for their Andrea Bertof bomb. Buh bye. Career worst for Haddish and McCarthy movies.

“Racing in the Rain is hitting it’s underwhelming projected $8 million opening.

And “Brian Banks” is a wide release debacle, not even clearing $2, not cracking the top ten.

“The Farewell” added theaters…again…bit only hit $2 and is fading.

“Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” may find $11 million more in sales this weekend.

“Lion King” is holding audience better than anybody, adding another $19 and change for third place.

https://deadline.com/2019/08/dora-and-the-lost-city-of-gold-hobbs-shaw-the-kitchen-box-office-weekend-1202665153/

We know it’s wrong, just as he does.

But when teenage Adam lies to cute, cool New York lesbian Gillian, who thinks he’s trans, it’s funny. Because he then does his homework, mastering the jargon, the medical and psychological steps he’s supposed to be going through, working it to fit in with her crowd — at bars, parties, a “Women Only” S&M club — and to meet her expectations.

And when the horny teen visiting New York becomes a lovesick lad and dons a strap-on, because that’s what she expects? “Funny” flirts with “hilarious.”

Ariel Schrag, who made her bones writing for TV’s “The L Word,” was right making “Adam” a 2006 period piece. I’m not sure how much license we’d grant, even given her bonafides, in creating a situation that’s sure to be offensive to the gay community and having her “hero” (Nicholas Alexander of TV’s “Good Girls”) the-opposite-of-“woke” in the present day.

We need to laugh at Adam, and with him. Because, let’s face it, a “Women Only” S & M club with gay-and-trans women donning loaner leather and strap-ons for a simulated biker-bar oral sex contest is FUNNY.

But that’s only funny until Adam, and we, see the BIG error of our ways.

Adam and the movie about him turn on a dime, showing us the stakes in all the politics, all the marching, all the superficialities the straight or cis-gender attach to “gay” as a “lifestyle.”

People’s lives are at risk. Their right to live those lives as they see fit and their expectations for the future are at the heart of every head-scratching thing this fish-out-of-water kid observes in his full immersion in New York Gay — from “L Word” watching parties to “Trans Camp.”

These are activists living lives with consequences.

Schrag, director Rhys Ernst (of TV’s “Transparent”) and a delightful cast make “Adam” one of the great delights of the cinematic summer.

And you thought “Booksmart” was smart.

Adam is a suburban teen having no luck socializing with the opposite sex, but hellbent on not spending summer at “the lake house” with his parents, with Mom (Ana Gasteyer) realizing he’s “down in the dumpies.”

He’ll summer in New York, staying with big sister/coed Casey (Margaret Qualley). Maybe he’ll meet the new boyfriend she’s told the folks about, Mark.

Only there is no Mark. And Adam knows it. Casey, given a kid-in-a-candy-store flightiness by Qualley, the break-out star of “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood,” is a young, beautiful lesbian loose in a city just loaded with young women just like her.

The kid brother is about to get an education, and how.

Casey is so over the moon about her new freedom that she’s taken up with a very feminine transgender person with the same name, “Boy Casey” (Maxton Miles Baeza). She broke up with cute truth-teller June (Chloë Levine, stealing scenes) to do that, something roommate Ethan (Leo Sheng) and even Adam can see was a bad move.

But there’s so much MORE to see that Adam can’t waste time on that. Go to the Washington Square march, hand out “Queers Against Gay Marriage” (don’t ask) fliers, borrow an ID to get into “the club.”

“It’s a dyke club,” June illuminates. “It’s full of dykes.”

If you think you’re having trouble with the “fluid” understanding of sexuality that’s become the norm today, imagine a virginal, sexually-insecure teen getting his mind around all this in 2006. Adam sticks his foot in it, defensive about wanting a “GIRLfriend” and not a boy one, tactlessly failing to grasp Casey’s thing for a guy who is “not a real guy, with a penis” and all.

Ethan, with whom he has an oddly intimate chemistry, becomes Adam’s guide and confessor.

Then Adam meets Gillian (Bobbi Salvör Menuez of “Landline”), an otherworldly redhead, at a party.

They click. But when she says “I’ve never dated a trans guy before,” he doesn’t correct her. And that’s where the movie goes, lie after lie, guilt and regret covered by “homework” and great efforts to fake his way through a relationship that races toward intimacy built on a bed of lies.

“I’m not actually ‘trans,'” and “I’m still in high school” are hard things to work into conversation after, you know, a certain point.

Schrag’s script, based on her book, is seasoned with some delicious one-liners, from the drunken bar-pickup who declares to Adam, “This is the year my poetry REALLY takes off” to the ever-enthusiastic Casey’s suggestion for what Adam take to the gay rights march.

“You should make a sign that says ‘I won’t get married until my sister can!'”

College coed Gillian is worried about majoring in Women’s Studies. “Hi, I’m gay and I’m majored in being gay!'”

And Adam, his eyes darting with apprehension at being found out, peppers his speech with the “hetero-normative” jargon that is part and parcel of the whole political/sexual/gender-identification lifestyle of it all.

Maybe it wouldn’t be this easy to “pass,” with every woman at the gay bar wanting to know “When did you, you know, transition?” But it’s hilarious to think an insecure guy would toss his last shred of masculinity just to gain the approval of the coed who prefers other coeds.

“Adam” makes you realize we’re a long way from “Chasing Amy.” Or maybe not.

Menuez gives Gillian a sort of knowing naivete and ahead-of-her-time enthusiasm, a youthful willingness to abandon what she thought she knew about who she’d be attracted to. Sheng and Levine bring great vulnerability to characters still figuring themselves out, sexually.

And Qualley sparkles as a willowy, pretty young thing aware of her allure to the gay women she meets, and unsure of what to do with that power other than to sample every candy in the shop.

“Pillow princess” might be the slang description that fits her Casey. Because heaven knows there are “gold star lesbians” all around her. It is 2006, after all.

See, Adam? You’re not the only one who does “homework.”

“Adam” is the sort of rom-com, coming-of-age tale that makes you want to.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with sexual situations, nudity, profanity

Cast: Nicholas Alexander, Bobbi Salvör Menuez, Margaret Qualley, Chloe Levine and Jari Jones

Credits: Directed by Rhys Ernst, script by Ariel Schrag, based on her book. A Wolfe release.

Running time: 1:35

They’ve been together forever.

You can tell from the lifetime of art, furniture, glass, silverware and china that fills their roomy but gloomy old house in the bourgeois corner of town.

It’s in their conversation, the gentle bickering with the sharp edge. Each knows how to cut the other.

And you see it in the way they look after each other, knowing when to take the wheel when the other’s had too much to drink, prodding one another to get out more, attend a birthday party.

But can “The Heiresses,” Chela (Ana Brun) and Chiquita “Chiqui” (Margarita Irun) withstand the tests of bankruptcy, separation, their quickly shrinking world together, the temptations of the world beyond their insular, homey bubble?

Paraguay’s selection to compete for Best Foreign Language Film at the most recent Academy Awards is a Dickensian or at least Austenesque portrait of atrophy and decline.

That’s not limited to the women themselves, who are not getting any younger, but still have their health (Latin American smoking habits be damned). It’s their lives together, their house, their “place” in this world of writer-director Marcelo Martinessi’s creation, all in decline.

Because as we meet them, a lady is humming through their dining room, counting silverware, sizing up the “estate.”

Nobody’s dying. But things are being sold off, “my father’s paintings,” furniture, glassware. Bit by bit.

That doesn’t sit well with Chela, who resents the fact that more of her things are going than Chiqui’s. Not so, says the accused, in Spanish with English subtitles.

“LIAR,” Chela spits, storming out, probably with good reason. Chiqui is the driving force of this relationship, and her finances are the big problem.

Carmela (Alicia Guerra) is trying to help, arranging sales and the like. But at Carmela’s birthday party, Chela realizes she’s probably told their whole circle of acquaintances about their plight. Perhaps she’s being paranoid, but Chela is sensitive to the shame of it all.

Because Chiqui is about to leave her. Something about her finances have her headed to jail. Debtor’s prison? Credit fraud or some such?

With Chiqui in jail and visits limited to Wednesdays, the morose and submissive Chela has to find something to do in between visits and fresh sales of their joint property.

The unlit, troublingly quiet house (Did they sell the TV? Are power bills an issue?) is sure to make her crack, until she stumbles into a new pass time.

An older neighbor needs a lift in Chela’s father’s ancient Mercedes, and insists on paying for it. Next thing we know, Chela is an elder/Uber, serving her fellow little old ladies in their well-heeled corner of Asunción.

That’s where she meets the younger woman with no car (Ana Ivanova) who uses her service, passes the word on that service, drags her out to group lunches and regales her with intimate stories of her libidinous past.

Heavens!

Brun suggests a woman whose life has been so privileged, refined and conflict-free that she’s loathe to raise the volume, now. It’s a performance perfectly in pitch with the milieu.

The gay subtext here isn’t particularly sexual. What “The Heiresses” is caught up in the dynamic of the relationships, the possibility of blossoming and growth after decades of stagnation, the furtive thought of an affair.

None of which is really out in the open. As I say, “subtext.”

If there’s a serious flaw to Martinessi’s late-life love story it is the muted tones, the silences, the quiet flatness of conversations. There’s a little drama here, but you have to be looking for it.

The production design matches the somnambulant tone — subdued blues, underlit rooms, natural lighting in the car as Chela drives chatty neighbors and acquaintances hither and yon.

He keeps his camera on the ladies, letting us see the settings, from the emptying-out house to the just-as-quiet cafes and bars and parties. Even the karaoke is tastfully low in volume. And we never see the car from the outside, “establishing” shots always settle on faces and the rooms they’re about to enter, the drive they’re about to take.

Martinessi has made a modestly engrossing, too-too-tasteful film about older “ladies who lunch” and cope with their own form of quiet desperation. If only it had more spark, conflict, color and heat.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult subject matter

Cast: Ana Brun, Margarita Irun, Ana Ivanova

Credits: Written and directed by Marcelo Martinessi. An 1844 Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:38

Ask anybody who tracks interest in movies via their own reviews, web traffic for a film’s trailer, etc. They’ll tell you there is zero interest in most anything opening between now and “Ad Astra” in Sept.

Paramount seemed scared of how their “Dora the Explorer” film might land at the late summer box office, suppressing reviews etc.

It’s not bad, very small kid friendly.

But will it clear $20 million? Box Office Mojo has tracking sources that say this.

With “Lion King” and a likely to fall WAY off “Hobbs & Shaw” both headed to $20-22 million weekends, that puts “Dora” in the game.

I don’t see that happening. Under $20. It has no natural audience.

I caught the lame and slow “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” Thursday night with a theater about 1/4 full.

Will it manage $16? Based on the kiddie horror book and Guillermo del Toro’s name on the script and producer credits?

“The Art of Racing in the Rain” was never going to clear $10 million. Soft, squishy picture, weak leads.

Nor was “The Kitchen,” empowered lady mobsters, botched script, direction and flat performances.

Both of those will do $8 million or so and have to happy with that.

“Brian Banks” is not expected to crack the top ten.

I wonder if adding theaters with “The Farewell” is going to boost this sleeper hit’s take to $3 million.

And figure “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” to drop to $10 or lower. Mojo has it holding much better than it did its second weekend, over $11. Maybe, with “Hobbs” fading.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=4535&p=.htm

Slow to get going and lame once it gets there.

I’m tempted to leave “Scary Stories to tell in the Dark” at that, because that’s about all it amounts to.

There are effects, sure, in this collection of supernatural stories about…stories.

But the framing device, kids coming across a haunted book that the town’s legendary madwoman/rich woman/witch would tell to children who came to hear her at her haunted mansion, is tepid.

The child actors playing the kids barely register, and without empathy for them, where’s the pathos?

And the tales in Sarah Bellows’ “book of stories,” which write themselves, in blood, on the page as the “terrified” kids watch, waiting to learn of their fate, are a soggy set of recycled scares that won’t frighten anyone.

I get that this supposed to be a kid friendly horror movie. But when the frights are worn out and the few attempts at jokes don’t land, what you’ve got is “Goosebumps Lite.”

Norwegian director André Øvredal is best known for “Trollhunter,” and whatever hand producer and co-writer Guillermo del Toro had in it, they’ve conjured up a movie that does neither of their heady horror reputations any favors.

It’s Halloween, 1968, in Mill Valley, Pennsylvania. Any resemblance to the Derry, Maine of Stephen King’s “IT” is purely coincidental.

Stella, Chuck and Augie (Zoe Margaret Colletti, Gabriel Rush and Austin Zajur) start the night in silly costumes pulling an epic, fecal and dangerous prank on the high school bully.

They engineer their rescue at the drive-in, slipping into the car of wandering migrant worker Ramon (Michael Garza). As a reward, they take him to the town’s haunted house, where the Bellows family ruled their paper mill empire in the last century.

That’s how they come across Sarah’s book in blood. That’s when people start dying.

The hand-written stories have titles. “Harold” is named for a local scarecrow, “The Big Toe” is about a rotting corpse searching for a missing appendage, “The Red Room” is about…you know.

The legend was, if you “ask Sarah to tell you a story, it’ll be the last story you ever hear.”

Idiotically, nobody asks her to do any such thing in the spooky house. But who cares about horror “rules” in a movie like this?

Stella (Colletti) fancies herself a story teller, and she swipes the book. Doom awaits them all.

“You don’t read the book,” Stella figures out, “the book reads you.”

The movie goes to some pains to separate the kids so that can face their fates alone.

Ghoulish scarecrows are always spooky, and it got a few hairs upright on my neck. Nothing else, though.

Gil Bellows and Dean Norris show up in underdeveloped adult bit parts. Nixon’s election plays in the background as watch warmed over horror situations (spiders spewing out of a boil, etc ) served up as if they’re the latest thing.

Whatever its pedigree — a well-known author, two established horror brand names behind the production — the most telling element of “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” is the release date.

August is Hollywood’s legendary dumping ground for junk it can’t unload into theaters any other month of the year. “An August film” lowers expectations, even if there are occasional hits and exceptions to that “leftovers from the summer” rule.

“Scary Stories” is no exception, isn’t scary and isn’t worth the nearly two hours it eats up.

Wait for “IT: Chapter 2.” When it comes to horror, Maine is always scarier than Pennsylvania.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for terror/violence, disturbing images, thematic elements, language including racial epithets, and brief sexual references.

Cast: Zoe Margaret Colletti, Michael Garza, Gabriel Rush, Lorraine Toussaint, Gil Bellows and Dean Norris

Credits: Directed by André Øvredal, script by Dan and Kevin Hageman and Guillermo del Toro, based on the Alvin Schwartz novel. A CBS Films release.

Running time: 1:51

JT has this thriller, “The Fanatic,” that Fred Durst (Yeah, THAT Fred D) directed about an obsessed movie fan who crosses the line…several lines…in pursuit of an autograph from his ill-tempered, bullying idol (Devon Sawa).

A violent parable about celebrity, obsession and how easy it is to recreate Hollywood Blvd. in Birmingham, Alabama.

He’s doing mostly indie, low budget thrillers these days, oftentimes not films everybody gets a chance to see.

He was good in “Trading Paint,” the lower rung racing drama I last reviewed him in.

Better in “Gotti” than the movie.

He hit his Robert Shapiro portrayal in “American Crime Story: OJ” out of the park a couple of years back.

I’ve visited him on sets, as he lives in Florida and has filmed a few pictures here, tracked him down when he got that Golden Globe nom for “Hairspray,” chatted with him about Tarantino and about Nora Ephron’s “Michael.”

Always nice to the press.

Got a question or two for him? Comment below, and thanks for doing the heavy lifting for me.

My only question is “Dude, where in Ocala can I get that SHIRT?”

The plot description smacks of a teenage “Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

The teens are Jaeden Martell, Keean Johnson and Alex Neustaedter. Shea Whigham is the cop who might be “on” to them.

Norwegian model/actress Kristene Froseth is the wild card in their midst.

A24 and Direct TV are distributing it, early Sept. Ror the latter, early Oct. in theaters for the latter, for “Low Tide,” but “coming soon” is intriguing enough.

Catholic exorcism tales have just one serious rival when it comes to “religious horror” movies — the snake handlers of Appalachia.

There’s built-in suspense, the medulla-based terror of the reptile, the tension of not knowing if a rattler will bite, the fear that prayer alone won’t save those bitten.

Who needs zombies, vampires or ghosts when you’ve got a venomous killer draped around the heroine or hero’s neck, a backwoods preacher reciting “They shall take up SERPENTS” from his Bible and a congregation roaring “AMEN” as all this is going on?

“Them That Follow” is “Winter’s Bone” with snake-handlers. It’s a quiet thriller that suggests that the form the violence takes in such remote communities may be different, but its sources can be identical.

Murderous meth trade or patriarchal “spirit touched” preaching, such rigid, hierarchical scenarios suck us in, leaving us as trapped and lost as the antagonists up on the screen we’re meant to identify with.

Mara, played by Alice Englert of “Ginger & Rosa” and “Beautiful Creatures” is our trapped heroine this time. She’s part of a dirt-poor mountaintop community, raised on snake handling, not really looking for a way out.

After all, her stern, charismatic daddy (Walton Goggins, in a role he was born to play) is the preacher. So it’s not like she has a say in the matter, or a choice.

This sect has the 20something Mara hemmed in on all sides. Driving “is not meant for your hands.” Contact with the outside world is circumscribed. We never see a TV or hear a radio. Women in the church gather for sewing and quilting bees while the men search the woods for fresh vipers.

And Daddy’s got her mate, her future, all lined up for her. Her “choice” in the matter seems pro forma.

“Who you choose, girl, chooses your whole life.”

It’s just that Garret (Lewis Pullman) is Daddy’s in-my-congregation idea of a mate. Mara has had eyes for Sister Slaughter’s boy, the atheist Augie (Thomas Mann).

And within minutes of meeting her on the screen, we see Mara and pal Dilly (Kaitlyn Dever) hitch into “town” where Mara has to shoplift a pregnancy test from the only store, the one run by Mrs. Slaughter, played by newly-minted Oscar winner Olivia Colman.

Writer-directors Britt Poulton and Dan Madison Savage immerse in this wintry, primitive world of quiet, camo, wood stoves, beat-up trucks, mud and damp and clothes hanging on a line behind every house.

There’s so little going on that the barn where the church meets — no altar, no pulpit, no pews — a simple neon cross decorating its outside — is the only game in town.

We’re not going to be surprised that there’s drinking going on.

Dilly’s a teenager looked after by the pastor and community since her mother fled, leaving her to live in a tiny, worn out travel trailer.

But Mara’s condition is not something she’s going to be able to hide, long. It’s not something you can “pray away” any more than you can a rattlesnake bite.

“Take away the awful stain of my transgressions…Let me be pure again!”

“Them That Follow” takes its religion seriously, seeing its practitioners as sincere but misguided, and also hounded by the state. The preacher’s conversations reveal the extent of that.

“Rattler got’em in the neck,” a congregant passes on to him. “Family prayed all night, but he couldn’t fight off the venom.”

And as the victim was a “minor,” the law is on them.

“They out for blood.”

The Southern character actor Goggins (TV’s “Vice Principals”) brings his supervillain’s charm and steely-eyed sense of purpose to Pastor Lemuel. Like many a Red State politician, he’s quick to sell their faith in “us against them” terms.

“They don’t understand it. They look down on it. Down on you! And you, and you!”

“Our struggle is against the Devil who put-em there…This mountain…is our shield!”

The script is better at setting up the contrasts between the dutiful preacher’s daughter and the flattering young non-believer, Augie, than at letting us see real attraction.

“We’re never going to make any sense,” she declares.

“Your daddy’s religion” is all that stands between them, he argues. But it’s her religion, too, all she knows about.

If his mother can’t lure him back to services for a refill in the Holy Spirit, what chance does Mara have?

“Thanks, Ma, but I’m pretty full up today. Any more’d be just plain greedy.”

Mann isn’t the most fiery of performers, and Englert keeps so much of Mara’s struggle internal that it’s hard to work up much empathy for their plight.

Colman is superb as the most faithful woman in that church, explaining what she gets out of it, enforcing its dogma on the women but letting compassion guide her. And comic Jim Gaffigan brings gravitas to her husband, almost as devoted but a man with limits.

But Goggins grounds this picture in reality and makes a compellingly seductive villain, if you can even call him that. He lets us see the dogmatic Lemuel, the fear-monger and the judge in him.

It’s a quietly chilling turn as a man who is absolved of all guilt and all blame. Snake bit you? You didn’t have “the spirit.” Poison takes over your body? Your faith isn’t strong enough.

He’s the best reason to see “Them That Follow,” because his version of Lemuel makes us understand why they follow.

MPAA Rating: R for some disturbing violence

Cast:  Alice Englert, Kaitlyn Dever, Walton Goggins, Olivia Colman, Jim Gaffigan, Thomas Mann

Credits: Written and directed by Britt Poulton, Dan Madison Savage. A 1091 Media release.

Running time: 1:38

David Ayer is, according to The Hollywood Reporter, in talks to direct a WWII combat drama ‘El-Alamein’ for #Lionsgate.

The once low budget mostly horror and cheap thriller studio is staking a claim to combat pictures in the digital effects age.

That’s a niche with a high after market ceiling, as such movies enjoy long life on home video, streaming, cable and broadcast movie channels.

https://t.co/TKs19TGHk2 https://t.co/EImRGqcgvS https://twitter.com/THR/status/1159500079377584128?s=17

If one settles in for “Blinded by the Light” expecting it to be a giddy affair, hoping to be transported by the pre-1987 music of Bruce Springsteen, one is almost sure to be disappointed.

If so, it’s one’s own fault.

Because as much as one might have loved The Boss, the films of Gurinder Chadha or the expectation of an empowering message about racism and the liberation identifying with a great songwriter/spokesman for the down-and-out can be, as much as you might think that Chadha (“Bend it Like Beckham”) has been marching towards that day when she’d make a musical set among the Subcontinent Diaspora relocated to the U.K., those expectations are a tad too much.

Well, they were for this “one,” anyway.

Even though the picture’s cute and manages a few truly magical moments, the end result’s a bit of a slog — like the message-packed meanderings of Springsteen’s less popular deep cuts. It’s a “true events” comedy that wanders and gropes on past the point where it’s charming — an obese 113 minute comedy weighing on a 95 minute-wide chair.

Viveik Kalra is Javed, a Luton son of Pakistani immigrants in the 1987 U.K. of Margaret Thatcher and a rising “National Front” (neo-Nazis).

Yes, he’s spat upon by skinheads who don’t have the guts to shave their scalps. Yes, even the tweens in their neighborhood carry out cruel, racist pranks on the “Pakis.” His keep-your-head-down father (veteran character actor Kulvinder Ghir) rules Javed like he rules his house — as a dictator. He works, makes his wife, two daughters and Javed work, collects all the cash and kowtows to more successful Pakistani-Brits as if he’s living under the Raj.

“Start at the top and STAY there,” Dad counsels. More amusingly, he says, seek out Jewish classmates.  “Do what the JEWS do!”

He is, his journal-keeping son narrates, “stuck in another century.” Dad has determined his boy will go to college, study economics and then submit to an arranged marriage.

Javed just wants to write. He has scribbled down poems for years, even writes lyrics for his “Synth is the FUTURE” neighbor and lifelong friend, Matt (Dean-Charles Chapman), who has the ’80s fashions and ’80s hair to be in his own synth-pop “Pet Shop Boys” era band.

Javed is in school with Goths, “Material Girls,” “Banaramaheads” and the like, struggling to “finally kiss a girl and get out of this dump,” but oppressed, suppressed and depressed by the racism of others and the tyranny of his downtrodden “You will NEVER be British” father.

A Sikh classmate (Aaron Phagura) he just met has the answer. It’s on two quaint devices called “compact cassettes,” containing the albums “Born in the U.S.A.” and “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” by Bruce Springsteen. Bruce, “Roops,” preaches to Javed, “is the direct line to all that’s true in this s—-y world!”

Chadha underscores this “direct line” by having Springsteen’s lyrics swirl around Javed as he loses himself to “Dancing in the Dark” through the headphones of his Sony Walkman.

Javed has found his champion. Dad just wants to know, “Is he JEWISH?”

That teacher that looks for what’s special in any given student is played here by Hayley Atwell. The Boss gives Javed the courage to show her his poems, the guts to try and get his Pakistani kid into Springsteen essay into the school newspaper.

Reciting or singing Bruce is how he tries to win the fair Eliza (Nell Williams).

A few characters note how “nobody listens to Springsteen any more” in 1987, a performer relegated to “my dad’s music” by the teased-hair kids dressing like Boy George and Madonna. Matt’s dad (the hilarious Rob Brydon) proves that point.

When Javed starts to serenade Eliza with his favorite Springsteen song of romantic longing, real-life Springsteen fan Brydon makes it a duet (I think the song was “Thunder Road,” maybe “Badlands,” feel free to correct me) and “Blinded by the Light” finally becomes the neo-musical it really wants to be.

Chadha recreates the ugliness of the era, the racism that marched hand-in-glove with Thatcherism, the engineered recessions that amounted to a war on the working class (Javed’s dad works for Vauxhall/GM, and is laid off) as well as the daytime pre-rave disco dances Muslim immigrant kids like Javed’s sister (Nikita Mehta) flocked to without their parents’ knowledge.

The pre-college “Sixth Form” college Javed attends is like a John Hughes movie with British accents –the cliques, the laughable fashions, the tyranny of synthetic “art rock.”

And the director revives the magic of prosthelytizing music that you love by sharing a single pair of headphones on a Sony Walkman, more romantic and certainly more hygienic than trying that with the earbuds of today.

You have to take the movie on its own terms, as a reality-based fable that wades through a sea of corn. I was willing to go along with it, and got downright choked up when it hit its peaks.

But Chadha ham-fists her way through one dance number (Bruce is even less easy to dance to than he is to sing along to, in most tunes) and seems most at home in the disco.

Our young lead doesn’t have the range that the mythos of the songs demand. He is insulted, threatened, humiliated and treated with dismissal or contempt. He persists and marches towards something like a living-my-dream triumph, but I found Kalra pretty much a two-note, maybe three note performer, far less moving that the tunes underscoring his actions.

The kid who “converts” Javed is seriously shortchanged in the screenplay.

Ghir paints a lovely picture of a patriarch stripped of the things that make him valuable as the head of the family, but not too proud to insist his wife pick and kids pick up the earning slack.

Atwell is the generic white teacher who shows the kid of color his value, and Brydon is as amusingly broad as he always is.

I so wanted to love “Blinded by the Light” (my least favorite Bruce song) with its messaging and music that maybe I wanted too much from it. And certainly there’s too much of it. But if you’ve got permission to use all those Springsteen songs, the impulse to edit it into something tighter is “gone on the wind.”

It’s still an often-lovely coda to a summer of mostly brand-name blockbusters, and busts.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material and language including some ethnic slurs.

Cast: Viveik Kalra, Kulvinder Ghir, Nell Williams, Aaron Phagura , Rob Brydon and Hayley Atwell

Credits: Directed by Gurinder Chadha, script by Paul Mayeda Berges, Gurinder Chadha and Sarfraz Manzoor. A Warner Brothers/New Line release.

Running time: 1:57