As an artist in the public eye since the 1970s, Bruce Springsteen has cultivated a dedicated fan base through his honest, expressionistic lyrics and anthemic compositions, yet he still feels like one of music’s most surprising enigmas. His most personal and harrowing album, 1982’s Nebraska, revealed a raw, more fragile side of the Boss that still resonates with the lonely, heartbroken and pained. Its legendary recording — done on a TEAC four-track in a rented house in Colts Neck, NJ — has been well-documented, as is the breakdown that Springsteen suffered during and after its creation.
Director Scott Cooper depicts this tumultuous period in Springsteen’s life in the awkwardly-named Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, a dull, uninspired biopic that’s only bolstered by its dedicated, commanding performances.
Based on Warren Zanes’s essential book on the subject, Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, the film starts in Freehold, NJ, in 1957. A young Bruce (Matthew Anthony Pellicano) goes with his mother (Gaby Hoffmann) to collect his bully father, Douglas (Stephen Graham), from a bar. Jump cut to 24 years later to the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati, OH, the last night of Springsteen’s The River tour. The band rips through a rousing “Born to Run,” before adult Bruce (Jeremy Allen White) withdraws to the comfort of the backstage area to sweat and contemplate. After meeting with Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), his manager and record producer, Bruce places a towel over his face to rest. Soon after, he moves into the house in Colts Neck, where one of his greatest achievements — as a musician, songwriter and artist — will take shape: Nebraska.
Cooper follows this format throughout the film’s runtime, jumping between Springsteen’s childhood memories of abuse and trauma at the hands of his father to the present, where Bruce is a superstar retreating into the darkness on the edge of Jersey. Being home reopens old wounds, the memories of torment, violence and abuse reigniting a dark spark within him. Writing Nebraska is debilitating, and Springsteen seemingly suffers through it alone.
Cooper presents the dichotomies within families, even traumatic ones, as nuanced. Douglas is sinister, but he clearly feels disenfranchised and victimized. Later, we learn that he suffers from an unnamed mental illness that requires medication. Still, the Springsteen household serves as a haunting, inescapable reminder of Bruce’s childhood and past — experiences that one doesn’t simply gloss over or mine for material: these are real and damaging.
Deliver Me from Nowhere is almost entirely indebted to its performances, with Jeremy Allen White as its centre, whose perpetual lean and meditative aura shape his depiction of Springsteen.
While it’s commendable that White spent months preparing for the role, learning how to sing like Springsteen and play the guitar, much of the film has him brooding and staring off into space between mumbled bits of pretension. He has a quip for everything, pontificating in short, vaguely poetic spurts. Still, White’s skills as a performer, his charm and dedication, prove astronomical. Impressions and impersonations should never be cause for celebration, but White nails the Boss’s raspy croon so perfectly, it’s hard not to be impressed, even floored, by his voice. It’s uncanny.
Cooper depicts Springsteen as a rock ‘n’ roll traditionalist, and as a savvy, forward-thinking artist, his DIY flag flying high. His music was more radio-friendly and anthemic than some of the bands who influenced him, but when White growls through “Born in the U.S.A.,” slashing at his guitar while his neck strains and bulges, those punky elements become hard to deny. When he says that Suicide’s self-titled 1977 classic is the best thing he’s ever heard, we believe him.
Unfortunately, the film contains a glaring missed opportunity: Cooper doesn’t give us a single, uncut performance of White performing a song off Nebraska in full. White plays for a few moments, seemingly live, but Cooper never lets these performances play out in real time, cutting to memories and other scenes instead of basking in the songs themselves. After all that prep and practice, it feels like a waste.
Graham’s portrayal of Douglas is ominous and brutal, full of rage, disappointment and self-loathing. A scene where he teaches young Bruce how to box highlights the downright menace and cruelty of Douglas, with young Bruce clearly terrified of his father. As the maternal figure in Bruce’s life, Hoffmann leans gentle and vicious, protecting Bruce from his bitter father, but unfortunately, Cooper severely underutilizes her. Similarly, Paul Walter Hauser, who portrays Springsteen’s recording engineer during the Nebraska sessions, becomes little more than bumbling comic relief. He literally walks into a wall at one point.
Strong turns out a forceful performance as Jon Landau, the bespectacled father figure Bruce always needed, someone supportive, understanding and caring. In a heart-wrenching and serene moment before Bruce leaves for California, the two men sit on the floor at Colts Neck, leaning against Bruce’s bed with Sam Cooke’s “The Last Mile of the Way” layered over. Neither Jon nor Bruce speaks. The song plays. Reserved, intimate, powerful, it’s one of the film’s most impressive and sincere scenes.
Similarly, a sequence between Landau and his foil, parasitic Columbia record executive Al Teller (David Krumholtz), sees the pair discussing the merits and commercial potential of Nebraska. A simple moment that highlights the two men who want to lay claim to Springsteen’s potential, his future, his soul. Bruce’s desire to not release a single from Nebraska, no tour to support it, no press even: that was audacious at the time, and Teller’s incredulity, juxtaposed with Landau’s dedication, makes for great cinema.
Odessa Young rounds out the ensemble playing Faye Romano, Bruce’s love interest. While Young delivers a caring, direct and naturalistic performance, the film wastes her talents even more than Hoffmann’s. The scenes with Faye are sweet, showing the emotional cracks in Springsteen’s façade and ultimately leading to a major revelation for the Boss, but they also feel tacked on.
Cooper created Faye as a composite of several women Springsteen was seeing at the time, and she feels that way. Faye serves as a vessel that helps guide the genius of Bruce, his emotions and needs, and little else. Young tries to imbue her with blood and life, but the script does her no favours, preferring to position her as a muse instead of a character with a life of her own.
Cooper also clearly exploits White’s popularity and sex appeal (that’s one handsome, jacked Boss!), and the love story angle forms part of that. It’s a calculated move, employed to get non-Springsteen fans excited about a film depicting the isolated recording of a dour and dark album about spree killers and trauma.
The filmmaking itself reflects the movies and creators of the day, particularly the New Hollywood generation: the elegiac quality of Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Days of Heaven and the raw close-ups of John Cassavetes sinks into the film’s bones. Deliver Me from Nowhere contains an improvisatory quality in some of the scenes — particularly those with Bruce, Faye and her daughter at Asbury Park — but Cooper keeps the film controlled, to the point of feeling cold and artificial.
The cinematography is often gorgeous, reflexive and introspective: in the house at Colts Neck, sun-dappled corners and warm lamps mingle with pitch-black shadows, reflecting the duality within Springsteen himself. Springsteen’s memories, shot in black-and-white, however, could have used a lot more contrast to create rich visuals rather than the borderline sepia-toned remembrance Cooper gives us.
The film also uses sounds as a major source of contradiction and contemplation. The bombast of the live performances and his parents fighting stands in stark opposition to the elongated silence of Springsteen alone in frame, lightly fingerpicking, or on long drives with nothing but some radio crackling through.
All of Nebraska‘s inspirations are given some airtime: Badlands, which Bruce catches on TV late one night (although there’s no way that that film was shown that many times on network television in 1981); Flannery O’Connor’s short stories were probably the single greatest influence on Nebraska, yet they get less mentions and screen time than Elvis; the solitary streets and bars of New Jersey; and, of course, the haunted memories of a tough childhood. At one point, Bruce remembers a mansion on a hill, and then he writes “Mansion on the Hill.” He sees his childhood house (a recurring motif), then writes “My Father’s House.” While Cooper pays homage to all that inspired Nebraska, he crowbars them into the film to fit his Easter egg-heavy narrative.
Some of the film’s most effective scenes take place in the studio, showing Springsteen’s frustrations with the direction of the album and the technical and recording difficulties, his perfectionism wearing on everyone around him. It also demonstrates one of the film’s most egregious omissions: the E Street Band barely exists in this version of events.
While the film focuses on Springsteen and his self-imposed seclusion, the E Street Band appear as little more than sidemen, a backing band with no lines or personalities. To have the whole band in the studio and not have any of them utter a single word to Springsteen is laughable. They should be insulted.
Cooper can be a highly empathetic, humanistic director, but this also leads him to manipulation. He wants so desperately for his audience to feel something, to be affected by his films and characters, to the point where we can see exactly what he’s trying to do. He wants to force the viewer into feeling and connecting. Like Nebraska, the film’s about the past, silent forgiveness — it’s about all of us, yet the sense of gravitas it conveys can be sometimes overwhelming and moving, sometimes overbearing and annoying.
The writer-director’s penchant for melodrama and overwrought profundity exists throughout, and often the movie feels less concerned with the story than with its creator’s need to tell that story. Cooper writes quotes, not dialogue; scenes, not moments. It all feels too exacting. We’re supposed to witness the genius of Springsteen, but in actuality, the film wants us to see the effort of Cooper.
While the film attempts to examine the inner turmoil that Springsteen experienced at that time, it does so only superficially, using his isolation at Colts Neck and a lot of moping to paint a picture of a distressed and fractured Boss. Although it touches upon the depression Springsteen battled during and after the recording of Nebraska, the film treats his mental health as merely a stepping stone towards greater successes, a footnote that’s wrapped up with a concluding intertitle.
Cooper tries to find something mythical and profound in Springsteen’s anguish, which is particularly opportunistic. One particularly clumsy scene finds Bruce at a fair as he begins to disassociate. He sees himself as a child with his father; then Faye; then himself sitting in a burning room, playing his guitar and singing into a mic. Although this attempts to depict his inner state, the sequence only proves patronizing and cringeworthy, a corny, “cinematic” representation of his worsening depression.
In trying to examine this very specific moment in Bruce’s life, Cooper over-dramatizes to the point of melodrama, hyperbolizing throughout as he tries to make a personal, intimate story into something very Hollywood. The film centres itself as an ode to creativity and the need to define and defend oneself as an artist, yet it’s almost impossible to reconcile the film’s portrayal of Springsteen’s unwavering artistic integrity when its own has been so compromised.
Powerhouse performances and beautiful imagery fill Deliver Me from Nowhere, but, ultimately, it suffers from its creator’s need for gravity and the hagiographical depiction of its central subject. Even when Cooper shows Springsteen as flawed and vulnerable, many of the characters and personalities around him exist solely in service of his needs.
Although riddled with biopic clichés, it does manage to avoid some of the pitfalls by focusing on a very narrow period in Springsteen’s life, but that’s a small plus. Like most musical biopics, it falls prey to the same mythmaking so often promoted and conveyed by these films. It’s glacially paced, middling, and too manipulative to be anything but a disappointing pit stop, even for completists.
As the Boss himself says in the film, it’s not about the sound, it’s about the ideas. Unfortunately, most of Deliver Me from Nowhere is just absent noise. Baby, we were born to yawn.
