But he’s definitely aged, and the more Zimny drops in snippets of Bruce’s young, bearded and wild years, the more you note the contrast between the feral dynamo rushing around stages circa ’75 and the guy standing before you.

Even Western Stars, Springsteen’s 2019 retro-Cali-pop solo album (and the Zimny-directed performance film featuring that collection of sunny open-road ditties) felt like part of a larger reckoning with a legacy of influences, choices, roads not taken.

“Play it like Danny Federici !” Springsteen yells in honor of the late E Street member as keyboardist Roy Bittan approaches a glockenspiel (“His ghost is haunting us”), while cutaways to Jake Clemons butt up against clips of his uncle Clarence in full swing.

A trio of older songs he originally demo-ed solo in the early 1970s, back when he was considered the second coming of Bob — “Dylanesque” doesn’t do justice to how indebted they are to Bruce’s hero — now get the full Rosalita -operatic treatment.

But the experience of staring down mortality colors the entire affair here, from the shadow-filled studio corners to snowy winter landscapes — and rendered in such beautifully stark black-and-white images that you think Springsteen and the E Street Band walked straight into an Ansel Adam print, only heightens the mournfulness.

The single most recurring sight in Zimny’s movie, after the repeated scenes of men and women of a certain age getting lost in the music, is Springsteen pouring shots for his bandmates, engineers and manager Jon Landau.