The third Bruce Springsteen documentary by director Thom Zimny to play at the Toronto International Film Festival, “Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band” is also the biggest, the most expansive and the most all-encompassing. Ostensibly a chronicle of the world tour that Springsteen undertook last year, his first in six years, it also functions as a career retrospective of sorts. But more than that, it becomes a story of life and loss, because that’s the singular position occupied by the 2023-2024 tour.
Where “The Promise: The Making of Darkness of the Edge of Town” (TIFF 2010) was tightly focused on the tortured production of Springsteen’s 1978 album and “Western Stars” (TIFF 2019) was a document of a private performance of a more recent album, “Road Diary” takes a Springsteen concert as a template of sorts, which means it mixes joy and dread and love and regret and exuberance and silliness and seriousness; it’s intoxicating and it’s sobering, and it rocks like hell but confronts what’s been lost during Springsteen’s 74 years on the planet.