After “Yesterday,” Danny Boyle’s fantasy about a suddenly Beatles-free world, it is the second movie released this year featuring a nonwhite Briton whose life is changed by the transcendence of music.

Manzoor is now 48, a seasoned journalist, and the father of two children with his Scottish wife, Bridget. He is working on a new book and often does his writing at the British National Library, where he sat down over coffee recently to discuss the film and his membership in the vast tribe of Bruce fans.

It is weird, Manzoor said, to see your life onscreen, even if the fictional one diverges from the real one. The movie, for instance, leaves out his older brother, presents his mother as fluent in English and shows him actively arguing with his father, none of which is real. But the story is mostly true, he said, “emotionally autobiographical” in the way Springsteen’s songs are.

“My mum really did make clothes until 1 in the morning,” just as his movie mother does, he said. “My dad really did work at Vauxhall until he got laid off, and he really did wear suits to the job center” when he looked for a new job that never materialized, he said. And the teenager in the film, played by Viveik Kalra, is called Javed, which is Manzoor’s family nickname.

It is not realistic, obviously, to think that the people of Luton have a habit of breaking into Bollywood-style dancing in the streets. But that was a way the director helped incorporate Springsteen’s music and words into a film meant to tell the story of a young man yearning to be a writer and transformed by music. (This is another reality tweak. Back then, Manzoor wanted, if he wanted anything at all, to be a D.J.)