Documentary film “Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band”, which is currently available on Disney+ in South Korea, follows how Bruce Springsteen and his longtime colleagues prepared his world tour during 2023 ~ 2024. Although there is not anything particularly revealing about their career, it is still interesting to observe how they keep going even at this point, and the documentary did a fairly good job of presenting their admirable professional dedication.

At first, we see how Springsteen, who recently had his 75th birthday a few months ago, and a bunch of his colleagues and collaborators embarked on the rehearsal inside a recording studio. Because he and they had done any tour concert during several years, they were naturally concerned about whether they could pull it off well, but Springsteen looked casual and optimistic while selecting and arranging a number of songs to be performed at their concert.

As some of them frankly admit during occasional interviews, the beginning of their rehearsal was not so fantastic to say the least. When they performed one certain song first, the tempo was so slow that it almost sounded like a mellow ballad, and that certainly showed that Springsteen and his close colleagues including Steven Van Zandt were not young anymore compared to those old years of theirs.

Nevertheless, Springsteen and his colleagues and collaborators gradually got back into their element under his confident direction. Although he kept making changes and improvisations here and there, everyone was eager to join his creative process, and the mood among them became more enthusiastic as they performed together more and more.

Meanwhile, Springsteen and his old colleagues reminisce about how long they have worked together for more than 40 years. Around the time when Springsteen assembled the E Street Band, he and they were just young musicians who had just started their respective careers, and they still remember how much they struggled during that time. For example, they had to move from one distant place to another without much rest, and their performances were not always rewarding because they sometime had to perform in front of a very few audiences.

As many of his colleagues gladly recognize, Springsteen is not only talented but also very good at gathering talented fellow musicians around him, and he and many of them have stuck together during last several decades. Although some of them died or retired, the band has been consistent under Springsteen’s leadership, and this will be continued as long as he can perform on stage.

Around the time when he and his band members were about to perform in Tempa, Florida, the mood naturally became more serious, and we see how fastidious Springsteen are about the aural details of his concert. As making his band play again and again, he thoroughly checked how that sounded at the various spots inside their concert place, and that surely shows how much he cares about his audiences, though his band and Van Zandt, who happened to work as the music director of the tour, were not so pleased about playing the same tune again and again for several hours.

Once everything was ready to go, Springsteen and his band members delivered what their audiences were eagerly waiting for. They subsequently did more concerts here and there in US, and they were always quite exhausted whenever they finished another concert, but, as Springsteen jokingly said to one of his band members at one point, that was only the beginning, because they would also do many concerts outside US.

The second half of the documentary focuses on the concert held in Barcelona, Spain, and the documentary focuses on not only Springsteen and his band members but also a number of various European audiences willing to talk a lot about how Springsteen’s music means a lot to them. Knowing how much enthusiastic his audiences are, Springsteen sometimes had his audiences select a few songs to perform, and that understandably made his band members nervous at times.

And we see how his carefully selected song list effectively worked on the audiences. When two certain famous songs of his were performed one by one, they somehow came to resonate with each other with some emotional effects to be remembered, and you can clearly see that Springsteen has not lost any of his artistic touch despite his age.

In conclusion, “Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band” simply provides what Springsteen’s fans exactly wants, but director/co-editor/co-producer Thom Zimny, who previously collaborated with Springsteen in “Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You” (2020) and recently gave us “Sly” (2022) and “The Beach Boys” (2023), handles his main subject with enough skill and competence. Yes, I must confess that I still do not know that much about Springsteen’s career except a few songs including, yes, “Born in the U.S.A.”, but I was entertained enough during my viewing, and, in my inconsequential opinion, you will enjoy it more especially if you are one of his fans.