Eddie and the Cruisers

Eddie and the Cruisers. 1983 Embassy Pictures, released to DVD by MGM.
Starring: Tom Berenger, Michael Paré, Joe Pantoliano, Matthew Laurance, Helen Schneider, David Wilson, Michael "Tunes" Antunes, Ellen Barkin
Music: John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band
Director: Martin Davidson
Available at Amazon: Single DVD, or as a two-fer with the 1989 sequel.

Maggie Foley (Barkin) is a television reporter investigating the mysterious death of a musician named Eddie Wilson (Paré), and the disappearance of the tapes of Eddie's band's second album the day after his apparent demise. Eddie's band, The Cruisers, sound remarkably like an early '80s bar band with a lead singer doing his best Springsteen impression. Not bad for a band that was supposed to have existed twenty years earlier!

Eddie and the Cruisers regularly play TonyMart's club in Somers Point, New Jersey. They meet Frank Ridgeway (Berenger) there, and Eddie hires him to play keyboards and contribute lyrics, earning him the nickname "Wordman". Ridgeway's help sees the group shifting from cover songs to all original material, followed up by an album of original material called Tender Years, with the fictional number-one (and real life Billboard #7 in 1984) hit "On the Dark Side". Eddie seriously wants to be "great", which some of his bandmates and manager doesn't understand. They soon record Eddie's artistic vision, a record called Season in Hell (which probably would've been banned everywhere in the early 1960s in real life if only for its album title). Satin Records, which handles Eddie and the Cruisers, rejects the album, considering it "dark and strange". The next day, Eddie's car goes off a bridge. His body is never found, and he's declared dead.

Twenty years later, Satin re-releases Tender Years to even greater commercial success, and a documentary is planned. Foley interviews the surviving Cruisers (much of the story takes place in flashbacks), who have largely moved on with their lives, and only one of them is still involved with music. After Eddie's old girlfriend Joann (Schneider) is interviewed, she takes Frank to the Palace of Depression, where she reveals that she took the tapes after Eddie's crash, and this is where they've been ever since. The tapes are turned over to the band's old manager, who promises to release the album in a deal that will benefit everyone.

Maggie's story about the band airs, and we see a large crowd of people watching it on television screens from behind a store window. The crowd scatters, leaving only the long lost, and older looking Eddie Wilson behind. Happy to know that his music is finally being heard, he smiles and disappears into the night.

And six years later, they made a sequel.

As for the original movie, I have to say it's a recommended one. It was also one I remember well from my childhood, when HBO aired the hell out of it in 1984.