The film begins with an aerial shot of a wide-open desert plain, with wild horses running free. There’s an old barn, a car, a weathered hand sporting turquoise jewelry grasping a steering wheel, a silhouette of a man in a cowboy hat.
That’s not the way you would normally think of Bruce Springsteen introducing himself — but “Western Stars,” which had its world premiere on Thursday at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, is not a normal Bruce Springsteen film. Borrowing from the imagery of his recent album of the same name, it’s both an intimate concert film and a series of musings on solitude and community in song and story.