N.J. director on ‘Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band'

When COVID-19 shut down concerts and touring, Bruce Springsteen made the E Street Band a promise.

If they got through it all, he would throw the biggest party.

Because Springsteen just can’t go too long without a show.

“Since I was 16, playing live has been a deep and lasting part of who I am and how I justify my existence here on earth,” he says with a laugh in a new documentary.

Springsteen, 75, serves as narrator and subject in “Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band,” a fan’s-eye chronicle of the band’s tour that launched in 2023 and is still going strong.

That fan?

Director Thom Zimny, who has been working with Springsteen for 24 years.

“Road Diary,” which premieres Friday, Oct. 25 on Hulu and Disney+, is a salute to both the band and its global fans.

To make the documentary, Zimny steps into the role of director while staying in fan mode.

“This is not your typical rock ‘n’ roll film,” he tells NJ Advance Media.

“Road Diary” bounces between Springsteen’s voiceovers to rehearsal footage, concert footage, archival footage and fan interviews.

The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

“People were clapping in a way that reminded me of the shows,” Zimny says. “I think this film is our biggest hit right now and for that I’m grateful. It’s had a tremendous response.”

The director, 59, grew up in Point Pleasant riding a red Schwinn bike on the boardwalk, listening to early Springsteen cassettes on his Walkman.

When he works with Springsteen, it doesn’t feel like work, even when it gets intense.

“I grew up in the environment that he wrote about, but I also deeply connected to ‘Nebraska’ (1982) and also to ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ (1978),” Zimny says. “So I’ve recognized Bruce the storyteller from early, early on, and he just gave me a permission to dream in cinematic spaces — the sax solo on ‘Jungleland’ (1975) or the sonic qualities of ‘Nebraska’ all are very cinematic. So (with) ‘Road Diary,’ I held on to those things and really tried to take this film on to a new chapter.”

That new chapter focuses on Springsteen as storyteller but also as a bandleader, one who is the sound and face of a community of worldwide fans.

Zimny produced “Road Diary” with Springsteen and Springsteen’s manager and producer Jon Landau, The Boss’ fellow Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, who also appears in the documentary.

Before this one, the director’s most recent Springsteen films were “Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You” (2020, Apple TV+) and “Western Stars” (2019), the latter co-directed with Springsteen.

“Road Diary” starts with E Street Band rehearsals at The Vogel theater at Red Bank’s Count Basie Center for the Arts.

Springsteen remembers how the band used to play there in the ’70s, when it was known as the Carlton Theater (then Monmouth Arts Center).

Despite the recollection of Springsteen’s righthand man Steven Van Zandt that young Bruce was “the most introverted guy you’d ever met in your life,” his showmanship always spoke loud and proud.

Drummer Max Weinberg says that’s what he loved about Springsteen’s live shows — they had an element he believes was missing in many corners of rock before the E Street Band.

READ MORE: Steven Van Zandt, Renaissance man: Jersey’s rock maverick talks about ‘Disciple’ documentary

But after being off stages for so long, he says the band is playing too slow, so slow that the rousing song “She’s the One” (1975) sounds like it’s a ballad.

As the musicians prepare for their return, they don’t want to do anything that would tarnish their legacy.

Weinberg, 73, says they actively steer away from any vision of loping 70-something musicians. To overcome the initial slowness, he suggests summoning “some of that manic, out-of control way we played 50 years ago.”

Of course, that’s no easy feat for an entire tour of three-hour concerts.

When they set out to rehearse, it’s their first tour in six years — a much longer break than Springsteen planned, due to the pandemic.

Time and aging are themes in the film and the music, as Springsteen recalls his youth through song.

But the vitality of the band never seems to be in question, not when it’s obvious what each member pulls off every night on tour.

“I remember just trying to keep up,” says Zimny, who followed them from rehearsals to their American and European shows.

“This was a band that was fully engaged, this was a band that’s fully out representing the story … the story of Bruce, but also the energy and commitment of 50 years … I never, for once, thought about their age.”

Each night is a transformation, he says, with each player talking to one another through the music.

“You see it in their eyes in the middle of the show, you see the excitement and the energy throughout,” Zimny says. “But also you see the complete exhaustion by the very, very end of that last bow, where they’ve given their all.”

‘A great moment of trust’

The E Street Band continues to demonstrate its staying power onstage this month and beyond.

But the vulnerabilities of being human are part of its story.

Singer and guitarist Patti Scialfa, Springsteen’s wife, reveals in the film that she was diagnosed with early stage multiple myeloma — a blood cancer of plasma cells in bone marrow — in 2018.

“I just have to be careful what I choose to do and where I choose to go,” Scialfa, 71, says in the documentary, noting the effect on her immune system, which made touring a challenge.

Zimny, who was an editor on the 2001 HBO special “Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band: Live in New York City,” has also directed Springsteen music videos. He made his 2005 feature directorial debut with “Wings for Wheels: The Making of ‘Born to Run’,” which won a Grammy for best music film.

He’s known Scialfa since the beginning of his work with Springsteen, so she had a connection with him long before he sat down for hours of interviews with each member of the band.

Zimny says the subject of her diagnosis came up organically during those interviews.

“For me, it was a great moment of trust,” he says.

Springsteen, too, has faced health issues over the last year-plus, announcing in September 2023 that he would have to postpone shows on the tour because of peptic ulcer disease. Zimny does not cover this in the film.

The show cancellations and Springsteen’s illness did not become a focus of the film, he says, because while the media was covering that, he wanted to cover “bigger themes,” the ones apparent in Springsteen’s lyrics and the way he designed the show.

“Each tour, to me, was a story that Bruce was trying to share,” says Zimny, who also helmed HBO’s “The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town” in 2010.

His other Springsteen directing credits include “The Ties that Bind” (2015), about the making of the 1980 Springsteen and E Street Band album “The River,” and Netflix’s “Springsteen on Broadway” (2018), which won an Emmy for outstanding directing for a variety special.

Zimny’s non-Springsteen work includes directing music videos for John Mellencamp and Bob Dylan; editing episodes of HBO’s “The Wire”; and directing HBO’s “Elvis Presley: The Searcher” (2018).

He also directed “The Gift: The Journey of Johnny Cash” (2019); Netflix’s “Sly” (2023), about Sylvester Stallone; the series “Willie Nelson & Family” (2023; Paramount+); and “The Beach Boys” (2024, Disney+), with co-director Frank Marshall.

Part of the story in “Road Diary” is that the band is touring for the first time with music “untested” on such a stage, including songs from the album “Letter to You,” released after COVID hit in 2020.

It’s an album that reflects on “the ever-present truth of mortality,” Zimny says.

One song which became a fixture on the tour, “Last Man Standing,” is inspired by Springsteen’s first band as a teen, The Castiles, and its founder, George Theiss.

Theiss, Springsteen says in the film, died shortly after he wrote the song.

With Theiss’ 2018 death, at 68, Springsteen became the last surviving member of The Castiles — the last man standing.

In “Road Diary,” he remembers the days in the 1960s when the young band would spend the morning in Freehold getting their hair just right. The song is just one way Springsteen’s setlist tells a story, along with the order of those songs — newer creations meeting older hits in the show’s narrative.

“He is a writer and a storyteller, so the evening unfolds with an emotional narrative and an emotional arc,” Zimny says.

It’s how Springsteen communicates with his fans — to “let the audience know who I am at this point in my work life,” the New Jersey icon says in the film.

The film shows Springsteen constructing the setlist. Each show ends with the E Street Band playing “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” the 1975 song that recounts the formation of the band in Belmar. Then Springsteen finishes the show himself with acoustic guitar and harmonica in the song “I’ll See You in My Dreams” from “Letter to You.”

“I’ll see you in my dreams,” he sings. “Yeah, up around the river bend, for death is not the end.”

‘Until the wheels come off’

In one big way, the E Street Band’s tour, which started in February 2023, was a sigh of relief.

Coming back after six years and the COVID shutdowns, there was an “overwhelming feeling of gratitude” in the band, Zimny says.

And there were some changes.

Springsteen finally made Van Zandt the band’s official music director.

Little Steven’s reply: “40 years late, but fine.” (He’s been working on musical direction with the band since 1975.)

Preparing for the tour, he ran band rehearsals without Springsteen for the first time.

In the film, Van Zandt, 73, talks about doing everything in his power to make sure the audience won’t be underwhelmed.

“I want to kind of blow their f—ing minds,” the singer and guitarist says as the band transitions to the next phase of rehearsals at Trenton’s Cure Insurance Arena.

Members of the band like bass player Garry Tallent have been there since the beginning, in the early ‘70s. Others joined in succeeding years, like percussionist and singer Anthony Almonte, who became a part of the group for the 2023 tour.

Zimny shows how the concerts become a spiritual experience for the band and its fans.

People in cities across the globe report for Springsteen’s E Street church, singing along as if each word is sacred text.

But just wait till they get to Barcelona, The Boss says.

The city is known for its Springsteen diehards, home to one of the most warm and dedicated E Street crowds.

“It has a truly amazing history and energy to its acceptance of Bruce and the band and the music,” Zimny says.

“There’s a participation in Europe that starts from the very first moment the band comes onstage, where everyone is singing back every word and no one leaves till the very last moment.”

“Road Diary” devotes a fair amount of time to fans, including the looks on their faces as the band plays — how they savor every moment, “just in case” it all comes to an end, the director says.

“There’s something that’s magical that happens in the pit when you’re surrounded by a group of fans,” Zimny says.

While each E Street musician transforms onstage, there’s also a transformation among fans, he says.

“You get a sense of not only yourself, but the people around you, and you just feel different on that next morning and that next day — something has happened. And that, to me, is the magic of rock ‘n’ roll, and I wanted to try to show that in this film.”

Since the Toronto premiere of “Road Diary,” Zimny has gotten the happy feedback that people watching the film have felt like they’re at Springsteen’s show. He says sound was mixed for the film at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch.

One part of the documentary briefly zooms in on the lives of several fans.

Zimny interviewed people in different countries — Italy, Ireland and Germany among them — who have an intimate connection to Springsteen’s work. Those conversations touch on the bond shared by international Bruce fans.

Another fan favorite from the documentary is the 1970s archival footage from Springsteen’s vault, which Zimny uses along with photos taken by Pam Springsteen, Bruce’s sister, and Rob DeMartin.

E Street players reminisce about tour vehicles, sleeping arrangements and saxophonist Clarence “The Big Man” Clemons making breakfast for everyone.

Springsteen says he and Clemons, who died in 2011, were “different parts of the same spiritual body.” Jake Clemons, Clarence’s 44-year-old nephew, who also appears in the film, joined the band on saxophone in 2012.

His uncle speaks in the film through an archival interview. So does Danny Federici, the band’s organist, keyboardist and accordion and glockenspiel player, who died in 2008.

“Road Diary” is dedicated to Bruce’s mother Adele Springsteen, who was 98 when she died in January.

Springsteen’s awareness of his own mortality can be seen in his music and in the film, bringing questions about the future of the band.

Zimny doubts Springsteen will ever truly stop while he’s alive.

“I’ve never seen him just involved with one thing,” the director says. “He’s constantly creating, whether it’s things in the studio or other projects.”

It’s one reason Jon Landau calls his old pal “the maestro.”

The E Street band tour resumes Oct. 31 in Montreal and continues in Canada through November before setting off for England and France in May.

How long will Springsteen continue to tour and perform live? In the film, he addresses that one straight on.

“Until the wheels come off.”

“Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band” runs 1 hour and 39 minutes and premieres Oct. 25 on Hulu and Disney+.