‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ Review: Scott Cooper’s Uneven Snapshot at The Boss’ Crucial Album Features an Astonishing Jeremy Allen White [C+] Telluride
This musical biopic can be a tricky thing to get right, especially for a fan of the artist being portrayed in the film. The growing trend of using bland storytelling devices to prop up a mega music artist’s importance on the world can be heavy handed, formulaic storytelling to get audiences to remember the first time they heard the collection of hits that made them fall in love with their singers. It’s a pure nostalgic (sometimes cash grab) exercise that takes you on a journey from the time the artist was born, got their big break, had a mental, physical breakdown that causes them to need to make changes resulting in a comeback in the second half of their career, with plenty of music montages thrown in. So from the time it was announced that director Scott Cooper would be adapting Warren Zanes’ “Deliver Me from Nowhere,” the novel about music legend Bruce Springsteen and the making of his vital album Nebraska, this massive fan of The Boss and his extensive catalog of music became worried. From the time I could start talking and singing in the car with my Dad, the music of Bruce Springsteen guided my upbringing, much like it did for him when he was growing up in the 1970s. After ten years of hearing Bruce and the E-Street Band dazzle audiences across the country on the live albums he’d released chronicling his run of music from 1975-1985, I was lucky enough to get to see him live with my Dad in Austin, Texas at the Frank Erwin Center, which no longer exists.
It was as my father calls it “a religious experience,” a night that’s burned in my memory and made me even more obsessed to learn more about the artist that formed my taste in music for the rest of my life. Before the book, I knew so much about the Nebraska album, the rich, personal lyrics, how the music sounded nothing like Springsteen had never released before, and the struggle to get the record company to get on board and release the album exactly how The Boss wanted it delivered to his audience. What I didn’t know about was detailed in Springsteen’s autobiography, and even more so in Zanes’ book, which was the level of mental frustration, struggles with fame, and darkness Springsteen was facing, and how this music was pouring out of him, but he didn’t have the ability to explain what it meant. This crossroads for Springsteen is the core of the story found in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, which settled most of my nerves going into the film, knowing that there is plenty of story here to tell to bring an authentic Springsteen film to the big screen. And that’s why Cooper’s film might be one of the most frustrating films of the year, as he has all the pieces to deliver something special but gets trapped in the conventional methods of this cursed subgenre, some even self-created.
When we first meet Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White), he is finishing up his last show of The River tour in Cincinnati in 1981, electrifying the crowd with one of his signature numbers, “Born to Run.” Not even five minutes into the film, and White’s committed performance as The Boss is jaw dropping. If you closed your eyes, you’d think that Springsteen himself was singing but it is all the young, Emmy-winning actor, who also nails the stage presence that makes Springsteen the showman that he is, strumming his guitar as he contorts his face to release those mesmerizing lyrics, and as he ends the song, he jumps in the air, ending his time as the entertainer side of his life for the time, voice almost gone. That gravelly voice we’ve all come to know with Springsteen is hinted at by White in a conversation after the show with his manager, record producer, and longtime friend Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), as Bruce tells him he’s going to go away, return home to Asbury Park, New Jersey for a little while, and reset after a grueling, yet successful run on tour. Landau understands almost in a Phantom Thread-esque way that his superstar needs to reset, and that coming over having his biggest hit yet with “Hungry Heart,” he also knows that the record company is breathing down his neck to find out what Springsteen has up his sleeve. But he has patience that whatever comes out of this time of rest will result in something beneficial to all as well as authentic to the journey they’ve gone over with five studio albums. It’s this bond that makes the movie worth it, as both Allen White and Strong’s commitment to their excellent performances come from a real place of love that Springsteen and Landau had for each other that has gone on till this day, 51 years.
The next day, Springsteen arrives at his new rental house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, a ten or fifteen-minute drive from Freehold, New Jersey, where he grew up with his father, mother, and younger sister. As he returns to his old stomping grounds, memories start to flood of his childhood, and the harshness of his father Douglas (Stephen Graham), who abused him and his mother because he was always coming home drunk. Shot in black and white, we see a younger Bruce (Matthew Anthony Pellicano), quietly navigate a childhood within a household where either the next punch is going to come flying in or his father will show him a minor moment of relief, taking him to the movies or driving him and his sister to see a mansion on a hill (yes, just like the song on the album, very on the nose) to run in their field and look at the home they wished they had. As he is driving back and forth from his hometown to where he is staying, he parks his car outside of his old home, reflecting on this tough time of his life, and grappling with the pain it’s still causing him. If you are a casual fan of Springsteen’s work, you know how much about the rocky relationship the artist had with his father, explained perfectly in the song “Independence Day,” in which a father and song don’t know how to speak to one another as “the darkness of this house has got the best of us.” It’s a familiar point that we’ve seen not just in stories like this, but in real life, as my grandfather and father were unable to find the words for each other at times, struggling to exist. Time healed the wounds for my family and for Springsteen as well with Douglas, but Cooper refuses to dive deeper into this relationship outside of lazy, brief flashbacks, and a hokey ending that resolves very little of the pain implied throughout the film. Even the relationship he has with his mother Adele (Gaby Hoffman) in the film, which has been documented by Springsteen himself multiple times how close he was with her and her affection for him outweighed what his father did, is a woefully underdeveloped, wasted opportunity to dive deeper in the family dynamics within Springsteen’s life.
One night after a long drive, flipping through the channels on TV, Springsteen comes across a film that shocks him as he sits up from his couch and watches the elegant violence found within Terrence Malick’s Badlands. From this moment, he runs to the local library, searching more and more on this subject, this act of sinister rebellion ripped right out of the headlines, which inspires him to write the titular song off the album. While Malick’s film was a massive influence on the song Nebraska, Springsteen also was diving in other films not seen in Deliver, like Wise Blood, True Confessions, and The Grapes of Wrath, which he would later make into another song and acoustic concept album, The Ghost of Tom Joad. Beyond film, Bruce was diving into literature, consuming the works of Flannery O’Connor, a book gifted to him by Jon Landau’s wife, in an exchange that is not made in the film but the book does show up on a coffee table, as well as Joe Klein’s “Woody Guthrie: A Life,” Ron Kovic’s “Born on the Fourth of July,“ and Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” all of which show Springsteen’s darker look at the world around him, as the USA was still struggling with the ramifications of the Vietnam War and the fall of public trust from the Nixon Administration. All of this detail is lost or barely mentioned in Cooper’s adaptation, going for a simple look approach of Badlands (that he somehow saw three times in a row in within a week a home; no possible folks), as the main source of him calling Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser), Springsteen’s recording engineer for the album.
The recording sessions, which were done in Bruce’s bedroom on a four-track TEAC 144 Portastudio recorder, a relatively new device that allowed musicians to perform a basic track first before adding additional parts on the remaining tracks. In doing this basic set up, Springsteen wanted the songs to feel like it was just him recording the songs for himself. This is where the magic of this period of Nebraska comes in and where Jeremy Allen White crushes his turn as Springsteen, as he nails every single heartbreaking inflection displayed within the songs of Nebraska. It’s a one of a kind, detailed performance that will rank as one of the best of the year, cementing White as one of the best actors of his generation, giving an all-time acting showcase within a biopic. Later in the film, when Bruce has finished the recordings and brings them into New York City to record with the E-Street Band, White gives an ungodly good rendition of “Born in the USA” that will leave you speechless when you hear it. It’s as if the actor made a deal with the devil to become The Boss during the filming of this film, and in taking that deal, he crafted exceptional work.
While the film’s exploration of Springsteen’s Nebraska work is mostly handled successfully, and White and Strong’s chemistry throughout the film carries it over the line from the usual slop found in the biopics, but there is one massive thing preventing this film from being the great film on paper that this could’ve been, and that is the addition of a fictional girlfriend named Faye Romano (Odessa Young), the sister of a guy that Bruce grew up and went to high school whom he meets outside of a small music venue in town called The Stone Pony. Faye, a single Mom who works at a diner and lives with her parents, has been a fan of Bruce’s music for a long time and the two become closer as he spends his time making the album. But as time goes on, and the darker down the road he goes with Nebraska, the more he realizes he can’t be with her and needs to leave his past behind. Young, a perfectly fine, talented actress in her own right, is delivering pretty subpar work here that is squandered by this pointless subplot that Cooper added in that is beyond bland. In real life at the time, Bruce was dating actress Joyce Hyser, before marrying Julianne Phillips in 1985 while also being in a relationship with his now lifelong musical partner, wife Patti Scialfa; a fascinating time for his romantic life. When he was with Hyser, Springsteen pushed her, along with everyone else, at the time to make this record, so the shoehorning of Young’s character into this story is unnecessary and only brings down the momentum of the film because it adds nothing to Bruce’s story in the end. In wanting to make an “unconventional bio-pic,” Cooper sadly delivers one of the biggest cardinal sins of the subgenre with Romano; adding a poorly written female character who only serves as eye candy for our male lead. And don’t even get me started on Grace Gummer as Barbara Landau, whose only job in the film is to sit and listen to her husband; another blown opportunity.
Being close to the subject matter and knowing a lot of what Cooper left out is a vast reason why this is one of the most frustrating films of the year because inside of it is the attempt of trying to explore this dark, specific time within Springsteen’s life, matched only by Allen White and Strong’s sublime work saving the whole exercise. Maybe the project was rushed into production because it’s the first film under producer Scott Stuber’s new company since leaving Netflix, or maybe it needed another person to take a pass at the script, or maybe it was as simple as the man behind the camera, whose filmography is far from celebrated enough to be given the chance to tell the story of this important moment with one of the greatest artists of all time. I mean the creators of this project couldn’t even trust the audience to know it was a film about Bruce Springsteen without putting his name in the title; a nasty trend in biopics like this continues to be moronic. Whatever the case may be, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere will leave you wanting more, for good and bad reasons that might not ever get explored again on the big screen.
Grade: C+
This review is from the 2025 Telluride Film Festival where Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere had its world premiere. 20th Century Studios will release the film theatrically in the U.S. on October 24.
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