Down and out in New Jersey: Bruce struggles—and so does the film
Bruce Springsteen’s loyal longtime fans are bound to love the awkwardly-titled Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, but whether or not anyone else will is questionable. Those seeking a comprehensive biopic of the rock star in the vein of Rocketman (Elton John), Back to Black (Amy Winehouse), or Bohemian Rhapsody (Freddie Mercury) won’t find it here. Instead, based on the 2023 book Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska by Warren Zanes, the picture covers only one specific moment in Bruce’s life: the period when he wrote and recorded his 1982 album Nebraska.
Nebraska was an unconventional and profoundly personal album, written and recorded not in a studio, but on lowtech equipment in the bedroom of Bruce’s Colt’s Neck, New Jersey rental home. Following his tour for his previous successful double album, The River, Bruce (Jeremy Allen White, The Bear) decamps alone to Colt’s Neck to write, reflect, and process both his burgeoning fame and his traumatic past. From that set up, writer/director Scott Cooper (Black Mass; Out of the Furnace) explores how Bruce’s lingering childhood emotional wounds influence his creative process and his personal and professional relationships.
Black and white flashbacks allow us to see why the adult Bruce is struggling. Played by the remarkable newcomer Matthew Anthony Pellicano, Jr., eight-year-old Bruce and his mother Adele (Gaby Hoffmann) are tormented by Bruce’s erratic, abusive father Douglas (Stephen Graham, Adolescence’s recent Emmy winner). Cooper makes Bruce’s complicated relationship with his troubled father a thematic throughline, often to a fault. The father/son redemption story tends towards the clichéd at times. Similarly, Bruce’s budding relationship with Faye (Odessa Young), a fictional composite of Bruce’s real girlfriends during this time, feels less complex and real and a little too narratively contrived. Young does a decent job with a small-town, single mother waitress character straight out of one of Bruce’s working-class ballads. That Faye could be in a Bruce song may be the point, but the caricature feels lazy and too neat.
What’s more interesting is the look we get at Bruce’s creative process, and the tidbits we learn about Bruce’s other influences for Nebraska, aside from his unhappy childhood memories. Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, Terrence Malick’s film Badlands and Charles Starkweather, the serial killer who inspired it, all stir Bruce’s imagination. Credit to Cooper for showing us not just Bruce strumming an acoustic guitar in his bedroom or rocking out on a stadium stage, but also in his local library, poring over old newspaper articles about Starkweather on a microfiche. Art takes painstaking work of all kinds.
While the script may not feel entirely fresh, the bigger question is that of White’s portrayal: can he sing like The Boss? Thankfully, yes. While White bears little resemblance to the man he plays, White’s vocals are impressively accurate. And as viewers of The Bear can attest, White excels at playing sensitive men whose repressed emotions and unresolved issues threaten their well being. An affecting scene of White’s Bruce in a therapist’s office, finally confronting his depression and trauma head on, proves that beyond a doubt.
Among the supporting cast, the always great Jeremy Strong (Succession; last year’s The Apprentice), as Bruce’s manager Jon Landau, lets us feel the genuine love and compassion Jon has for Bruce. More than just business colleagues, Jon and Bruce share a deep friendship, and the chemistry between White and Strong makes that relationship feel lived in and authentic. In smaller parts, Graham is terrific as Bruce’s scarred and emotionally unavailable father, but Hoffmann is saddled with a stereotypical long-suffering wife role. Paul Walter Hauser as Bruce’s recording engineer Mike Batlan provides some gentle levity, and David Krumholtz chews a few scenes as Al Teller, the clueless Columbia Records executive who doesn’t understand Bruce’s vision, and just wants another guaranteed hit. Meryl Streep’s daughter Grace Gummer, however, is completely wasted in an underwritten role as Jon’s wife, Barbara, whose only purpose appears to be to listen to Jon explicate Bruce’s current state of mind and motivations.
The film’s hackneyed, obvious dialogue also doesn’t help matters. “What about facing your stuff instead of running from it?” Faye asks Bruce earnestly at one point, as we groan. And in case somehow you miss it, Bruce explains that he’s “tryin’ to find the real in all the noise.” Thanks for that. But the movie’s nods to Bruce’s album following Nebraska, a little record called Born in the USA, almost make up for the picture’s weak spots. While writing Nebraska, Bruce also penned many of the hits on that famous 1984 album, and hearing their early versions and origin stories is great fun. But these worthy small moments are few and far between in a mostly mediocre film about a larger than life, almost mythic figure, whose artistic and mental health journeys deserve better.
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Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is now playing in theaters, including at the AMC Metreon and the Apple Van Ness in San Francisco, the AMC Bay Street in Emeryville, the Rialto Elmwood in Berkeley, and the Landmark Piedmont and Grand Lake in Oakland.
