Asbury Park: Riot Redemption Rock n Roll

Hailed by one contributor to this powerful documentary as "the Liverpool of America", Asbury Park on the New Jersey shoreline was the hub of a vibrant late-1960s music scene that famously spawned Bruce Springsteen, whose earliest albums featured the location and its real-life characters. Split into an "East" and "West" side, with the haves and have-nots largely drawn along racial lines, it was also the scene of violent rioting in 1970, triggering a decline in its fortunes that lasted close to 20 years. Springsteen himself, alongside members of his E Street Band and other musicians with whom he shared a stage, paint evocative portraits of a burg that remains to some degree a microcosm of the US. The Boss's music is used sparingly to punctuate Asbury Park's rise, fall and subsequent shoots of recovery, emboldened by the optimism of long-term inhabitants who worked their way into positions of political and social prominence, their affection for the city's frayed-at-the-edges grandeur evident in every scene.