3 Docs to Watch For: A Disgraced Governor, the Hot Bard of New Jersey and Steamy Mormon Sex

Far more serious-minded and admittedly quite a bit less entertaining is Thom Zimny's earnest The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, which chronicles the difficulties Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band faced after the massive surprise success of Born to Run. Zimny combines present-day interviews with vintage recording-studio footage, in velvety black-and-white, of Springsteen and his gang horsing around, stressing out and, eventually, recording. In the present-day interviews Springsteen is, as usual, calmly philosophical and possessed of a great deal of old-fashioned common sense as he talks about his songwriting process (after the album was finally completed, dozens of songs lay unfinished and rejected) and about how important that album was for him, as a way of paying tribute to where he came from and how hard his parents worked just to make ends meet.

Though I don't expect everyone to love Bruce Springsteen, I generally distrust anyone who actively dislikes him. And face it: It's hard to discount how great-looking he always has been, and is. If you grew up in a blue-collar or lower-middle-class family, Springsteen represented a possible ideal boyfriend, the kind of guy you could attain even if your father didn't have a fancy job; he was an approachable poet. The footage Zimny gathers shows Springsteen in all his youthful, no-big-deal glory: It's touching to see, even though most of that footage shows him and his bandmates at loose ends, just not knowing what to do.

The picture's finest section, for me, is the one that deals with "Because the Night," which Springsteen couldn't (or didn't want to) finish and which he gladly handed over to Patti Smith. Springsteen candidly says that he just didn't feel ready to write a love song at that point -- he didn't want to do the hard work of it.

On-camera Smith, looking radiant in own ragamuffin way, tells a wonderful story about how she came to finish the song. She was involved in a long-distance romance with the man who would later become her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith of the MC5, and one evening, she was waiting for him to call. Frustrated, she sat down to flesh out Springsteen's unfinished lyrics. "In the end," Smith explains with a smile that's both impossibly shy and incredibly open, "it tells the story of me waiting for Fred to call, and of my love for Fred." Fred did call, at about 3 a.m., but Smith says she wasn't angry. She had finished her portion of a glorious and passionate song about one of the most agonizing aspects of modern love: Waiting for a boy to call.

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