Light of Day

Director: Paul Schrader

1987 / 107min / 35mm

Bruce Springsteen was originally intended to star in Schrader’s blue-collar rock ’n’ roll melodrama, but after the Boss took off with its original title in his back pocket—“Born in the U.S.A.”—he presented the renamed Light of Day as a title track in exchange, and Joan Jett and Fox stepped in to portray working-class Cleveland siblings trying to keep their dreams of musical stardom alive between shifts at the steel mill. This least-seen of Schrader’s top-shelf works is a film with an unusual level of insight into the exigencies a gigging band surviving on a shoestring’s life on the road, featuring a rafter-rattling performance of Jett’s “This Means War,” a superb Gena Rowlands as Jett and Fox’s devout mother, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from a baby-faced Trent Reznor.

Distributor: Paramount

Part of Back to the Fox: The Early Films of Michael J. Fox