“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.”
– Flannery O’Connor
Bruce Springsteen struggles to put together his 1981 album Nebraska while coming to terms with something inside that he can’t put to words in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, opening in Prague and cinemas worldwide this weekend. The gorgeous widescreen presentation and various musical highlights make this one worth seeking out in the cinema, but heartfelt performances and tender handling of the material (from Warren Zanes‘ book of the same name) by writer-director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) elevate Deliver Me from Nowhere far above the usual genre fare.
Another music biopic? Audiences approaching this latest addition to the genre may be justifiably apprehensive. Films like Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, Walk the Line, Bob Marley: One Love, and countless others are churned out at a rate of about 2-3 per year; they’ve started doubling up on the subjects, with Bob Dylan biopics A Complete Unknown and I’m Not There releasing within two decades of each other, and the most memorable additions to the genre have been straight up parodies in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.
But while it may take some time to get on the same wavelength as Deliver Me from Nowhere, audiences open to the experience will be greatly rewarded: this isn’t another music biopic. This isn’t even a movie about Springsteen at all—it’s a movie about depression, and the Boss is merely the vessel to tell its story.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere opens in 1981, as Bruce (Jeremy Allen White) closes out his most recent tour with a rousing rendition of Born to Run. He’s on the verge of music superstardom, and producer-manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) puts him up in a rented house in Colts Neck, New Jersey so he can get some peace and quiet and maybe start working on his latest album.
The location is near where Springsteen grew up, and sequences shot in an evocative high-contrast black-and-white by cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi capture key moments from his 1950s childhood, mostly involving his caring mother (Gaby Hoffman) and alcoholic father (Stephen Graham, in a standout, understated performance). We expect scenes of trauma or abuse at the hands of his father, but while Cooper is careful to acknowledge an undercurrent of menace and the threat of violence, he instead leans toward a kind of chilly nostalgia, memorably underscored in scenes of the Bruce and his dad watching Night of the Hunter at the local cinema.
In Colts Neck, Bruce catches Terrence Malick‘s Badlands on TV and researches the Charles Starkweather killings that inspired it. He writes enough songs for a double album, and records them by himself, in his bedroom, on a four-track recorder with the help of sound engineer Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser). They produce a single cassette that would contain the songs from Nebraska, as well as future hits like Born in the U.S.A.—taken from the title of a script Taxi Driver scribe Paul Schrader sent to him, with the intent he star in the movie alongside Robert De Niro (that film would eventually become Light of Day, with Michael J. Fox in the role originally intended for Springsteen).
Up to this point, nearly halfway through Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, there doesn’t appear to be much going on in Cooper’s story. It’s amusing watching Springsteen research the Starkweather killings on microfilm with the zeal of an investigative reporter, a little less so charting a romance with diner waitress Faye Romano (Odessa Young)—but there’s no conflict in this narrative.
That changes with the appearance of the cassette, a physical manifestation on Springsteen’s hitherto unmentioned depression, passed around from hand to hand without a case: this stuff is raw. Jon doesn’t know what to do with it, and it’s the last thing record exec Al Teller (David Krumholtz) wants to hear. The E Street Band records a bangin’ version of Born in the U.S.A. in one of the film’s musical highlights, but they can’t get the other material right, and Bruce becomes increasingly frustrated as music technicians with the best equipment available can’t recreate the sound he made in his bedroom. And while there’s still no external conflict in the movie, the internal conflict starts to become suffocating.
Most movies would amp up the conflict between the talented artist and the greedy studio execs, but Deliver Me from Nowhere goes in the opposite direction: Landau is relentlessly supportive of both Springsteen and his vision every step of the way, and Strong’s disarmingly sympathetic performance perfectly captures a man who does everything he can but can’t possibly do enough.
White, meanwhile, never captures the essence of Springsteen, but neither he nor film are trying to recreate the familiar public image of the Boss. The actor has a certain sadness about him, also utilized in the TV series The Bear, that gets to the heart of what the filmmakers are going for here. Bruce Springsteen is as American as apple pie—and so are mental illness and depression. The version of Springsteen seen in Deliver Me from Nowhere shares a kinship with Charles Starkweather and Travis Bickle, and while what manifests from that comes out in different ways, the underlying condition is the same.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere may disappoint fans of the Boss or audiences looking for more insight into his story, but that simply isn’t what Cooper is going for here; just wait around a few more years for the all-encompassing Springsteen movie that covers his entire career. For those open to getting to know this character on a much deeper level, even if he isn’t the one you might be already familiar with, this is the rare music biopic that stands out from the pack.
