Many musicians refer to themselves as storytellers, but few of them have the tales to back up the claim. Bruce Springsteen does. And his song-stories about desperate dreamers trying to break free of dead-end towns resonate far from what he once called “the swamps of Jersey,” whence his music originated.

The new movie “ Blinded by the Light ” — based, as its opening announces, on a true story — showcases Springsteen’s music as the driving force in the life of a 1980s teenager in the London suburb of Luton. Javed, the son of Pakistani immigrants, is 16 and feeling very stuck in a one-horse town in which the local racists are keen to shut down its one mosque.

An aspiring poet and lyricist, Javed , unlike many of the characters in Springsteen’s songs, isn’t a car nut. He’s not only clueless about all things chrome-wheeled and fuel-injected, but he’s also rarely permitted to drive his family’s bucket of bolts. Yet he is intimate with other Springsteenesque conditions: of being tired and bored with himself, of wanting to change his clothes and hair and face, of asserting that he’s a man and not a boy, and of believing in the promised land.