Movie Review: Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere

By John Corrado

Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska is and was not like other Springsteen albums. Stripped down, acoustic, recorded in a bedroom on a 4-track tape recorder, it was a collection of ten deeply personal songs that had him baring his soul in a poetic, sometimes cryptic way.

It’s fitting, then, that director Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, based on a book of the same name by Warren Zanes, is a bit different from other music biopics. Cooper’s film focuses on the recording of the album itself, and it’s mainly a quiet character study of a musician going through the process of personal growth, and dealing with depression.

This depression threatens to completely consume young Bruce, who is convincingly played in the film by Jeremy Allen White. It’s not that the actor, best known for his Emmy-winning work as a jittery, obsessive chef on The Bear, looks exactly like Bruce; we are conscious of this being White. But he embodies and inhabits Springsteen in a deeper way, compellingly portraying the musician’s inner turmoil. It’s an excellent performance, with the jeans and tucked in flannel shirts making him enough of a credible lookalike.

Despite the opening rock concert performance of White’s Springsteen belting out “Born to Run” in front of a crowd, which shows us right off the bat how much the actor has committed to the role including doing his own singing, Cooper’s film is a more subdued affair. This is far from the flashy bombast of an Elvis or Bohemian Rhapsody. It’s more of a counterpart and companion piece to the Nebraska album itself, a snapshot of an ascendant rockstar recording his most personal album, before reaching superstardom with Born in the USA a few years later.

Bruce is coming off a big tour, sparked by the success of his 1980 album The River, which is enjoying airplay on the radio, when he returns home to New Jersey. It’s here that Nebraska will be written and recorded, in the bedroom of his house in Colts Neck. Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter are shown to be cinematic influences on Bruce, with Cooper’s film highlighting how they helped inspire the stark, barren darkness that permeates the Nebraska album.

In Jersey, Bruce pursues a relationship with young mother Faye (Odessa Young), but he finds himself pulling away from her. Flashbacks, artistically presented in black-and-white, show the source of his childhood trauma, stemming from an abusive, alcoholic father (Stephen Graham), whose mental health challenges are becoming more pronounced.

Cooper’s film is about an artist trying to find answers through his art, and hopefully find himself on the way to the top. Like how Springsteen bared his soul on Nebraska, the point of Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is to show the pensive, introspective person behind explosive rock ballads like “Born to Run” and “Born in the USA” (which White also offers a blazing performance of in the film, an outtake from Nebraska that would define his subsequent album). The film mostly succeeds at that.

In addition to White, Jeremy Strong is also excellent in a supporting role as Springsteen’s manager and producer Jon Landau. Strong’s signature intensity lingers beneath the surface, but he is much more of an encouraging force here, with his Landau being friend and even therapist to Bruce, while also going to bat for the album and his artistic expression. The quieter scenes between the two Jeremy’s – White and Strong – are some of the best in the film. Paul Walter Hauser is Mike Batalan, who helps him record the tracks. David Krumholtz is Al Teller, the Columbia record executive who is apprehensive about how to sell Springsteen’s new sound.

Cooper, who previously directed Jeff Bridges to an Oscar win as a country music star in Crazy Heart, is a good fit for this material. The film doesn’t entirely escape the conventional biopic elements, which are perhaps unavoidable in the genre at this point. But Deliver Me from Nowhere is carried by strong performances and a series of emotional character beats, offering a satisfying cinematic experience for fans of the The Boss. Cooper does a lovely job of weaving tracks from Nebraska into the film as well, which will leave you wanting to give the album another listen afterwards.