The 39th AFI Fest kicked off in Hollywood on Wednesday night with a brief tribute to Diane Keaton and then a prolonged celebration of Bruce Springsteen, courtesy of Scott Cooper’s drama “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.” But that celebration peaked in a performance by the Boss himself, who called the evening “my last night in the movie business” after a making a string of festival appearances in Telluride, New York and finally Los Angeles.
With a pair of songs that got the audience at the TCL Chinese Theatre on its feet doing the “Brooooce!” yells more common in arenas and stadiums than movie theaters, the night lived up to AFI President and CEO Bob Gazzale’s opening comments, which included the promise, “There is no more epic way to kick off this five-day filmic festival.”
Gazzale began his remarks by showing a photo of AFI honoree Keaton on the huge Chinese screen, calling her “our wonderfully warm, wacky friend Diane Keaton” before segueing into a promise that the 150+ films that would be shown from Wednesday through Sunday would “mess with your algorithm.”
For his part, Cooper said that the first movie he ever saw when his family moved to Los Angeles was Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” in the Chinese. He introduced the cast of his movie as well as Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau (portrayed by Jeremy Strong in the film), but fought back tears when he introduced Springsteen by mentioning that the iconic rocker had moved Cooper’s family into his own L.A. house after theirs was destroyed in the Palisades fire.
Cooper composed himself long enough to tell the audience, “If you stick around until the end of the credits, I promise it’ll be worth your time” — a hint about the post-screening entertainment that caused Springsteen to raise his index to his lips and give the crowd the hush sign.
The film was warmly received even without the promise of a mini-concert, but it’s safe to say that almost nobody had left when Cooper came back after the screening and said, “I teased that we might have something a little bit special. Well, ladies and gentlemen, Bruce Springsteen.”
To the surprise of no one and the delight of everyone, Springsteen walked out with a guitar and harmonica “I really love the people who made this film,” he said. “They really honored my work and my family and my experience.”
After thanking the filmmakers, the actors and the studio, Springsteen, who has accompanied the film to the Telluride, New York and now AFI festivals and occasionally performed after screenings, added, “This is my last night in the movie business. I’m sticking to music.”
He stuck to music for the next few minutes, performing an emphatic acoustic version of “Atlantic City” and then going into a version of his anthemic “Land of Hope and Dreams” that replaced the jubilant drive of the usual full-band version with a more measured, more mournful take.
Even in the subdued performances, Springsteen managed to bring the drama, backing away from the microphone to create a ghostly effect on the “Atlantic City” chorus (“Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact / But maybe everything that dies some day comes back”) and then doing the same in the next song on the repeated line, “Meet me in the land of hope and dreams.”
He dedicated that song to Scott Cooper and prefaced it by telling the crowd that the Chinese Theatre reminded him of an old movie palace in Asbury Park, New Jersey. “(But) outside, all hell’s breaking loose in the United States,” he said. “For 250 years around the world, despite all the faults that we’ve had, the United States stood as a beacon of liberty and democracy and hope and freedom. I’ve spent 50 years traveling as kind of a musical ambassador for America, and I’ve seen first-hand all the love and the admiration that folks around the world have had for the America of our highest ideals.
“Despite how terribly damaged America’s been recently, that country and those ideals remain worth fighting for.” As the crowd cheered, he added, “I’m sending this out as a prayer for America and for our unity. And no kings!”