Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is not the Bruce Springsteen biopic many fans are going to want. It’s not a career-spanning survey. It’s not an epic tour through his life and music. It’s set entirely over the course of a couple months in 1981 and 1982, when Springsteen moved home to Central New Jersey after The River tour and started recording songs alone in his bedroom. The demos eventually became Nebraska, a dark, spare, acoustic album in which Springsteen himself is the only credited musician.
Of course, when Nebraska came out in 1982, it wasn’t the Bruce Springsteen album many fans wanted either. In its strongest moments, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is the Nebraska of Bruce biopics: A dark, spare character study that narrows its focus on Bruce, not the larger-than-life rock god, but the dude from New Jersey with a ton of issues.
Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) spends what feels like half the movie at a rented house in Colts Neck, writing, thinking, and experimenting with recording equipment. The other half occurs in a series of studios, diners, and coffee shops, where Bruce meets with his loyal and supportive manager, Jon Landau. (Springsteen eats so many meals with Landau over the course of this movie that I started to think I had misinterpreted the song “Hungry Heart,” and it’s actually about how Bruce is just very hungry all the time.)
The record company hates Nebraska, naturally, but Springsteen and Landau (Jeremy Strong) not only stand firm on releasing it, they go further: They insist there must be no singles, no tours, and no interviews. The album will speak for itself. (I guess 40 years later a film that explains in extensive detail why Springsteen made it is okay.)
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This may be the only way to make a Nebraska movie; one in minor keys, with the E Street Band barely present. In Deliver Me From Nowhere, the darkness isn’t on the edge of town; it’s already blanketed all of Monmouth County. White, a soulful actor who can communicate enormous emotional pain with barely a word, is very good at conjuring this wounded artist on the brink of an psychological collapse.
But I wish writer/director Scott Cooper had gone further. The real Springsteen refused to compromise on Nebraska. He hated the versions of his Nebraska songs he recorded with his band, so he shelved them in favor of the original demos he created in his bedroom. His team spent weeks trying to figure out how to translate the distinctive sound on his homemade tape, which had been recorded improperly on crude equipment, to a master recording. The result was his most personal and direct musical statement; the one Springsteen himself now calls his definitive album.
But while that uncompromising spirit clearly animated the choice to make a Bruce Springsteen movie with a compressed timeline, you still feel Cooper’s somewhat incongruous attempts to lighten the cinematic version of this bleak period in Springsteen’s life. The film opens with a big concert scene from the end of The River tour; it doesn’t serve the story much, but at least lets the audience enjoy rock star Bruce before he spends the next two hours watching Badlands on television and tinkering with a waterlogged boombox. The same goes for later scenes in the studio with the E Street Band, where they blaze through a high-energy recording of “Born in the U.S.A.” that Springsteen loves — but knows will not suit the downbeat album he has envisioned.
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The only other upbeat sequences in Deliver Me From Nowhere come from its glimpses of a relationship that Springsteen strikes up with a waitress named Faye (Odessa Young). She is a Springsteen fan — as all residents of New Jersey are required by law to be — and she adores when Bruce invites her out for a late night ride on the Asbury Park boardwalk carousel. But if you know anything about the real Bruce, you know whatever happiness he finds with this woman is not going to last. (If you don’t know anything about the real Bruce, this film may not be to your taste.)
The Springsteen of Deliver Me From Nowhere is already a hugely popular rock star. He’s also deeply ambivalent about his success and, even more importantly, still haunted by a rocky childhood spent at the mercy of a depressed, alcoholic father (Stephen Graham). Cooper incorporates numerous black-and-white flashbacks to Springsteen’s early days in Freehold, New Jersey, most involving physical intimidation, a few devolving into outright beatings. Later, Cooper goes even further, and depicts Springsteen suffering from panic-attack-induced hallucinations, where characters from the past appear to him in the present.
Which is to say: At a certain point, Deliver Me From Nowhere sort of loses the thread of its stripped-down, unadorned approach. And if you’re not going to stick to the more grounded, unembellished version of this story, why use it at all? Why not just make the big sweeping Springsteen biopic — the one filled with his most famous songs and raucous concert footage — that most people would probably prefer?
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I’m not entirely sure I can answer that question. Deliver Me From Nowhere is appropriately reverent when it comes to the life of this great artist. (Landau’s character exists in the story mostly to give Springsteen pep talks and to tell skeptical record company executives “In this office, my office, we believe in Bruce Springsteen.”) To its credit, the film doesn’t treat Springsteen as a saint either; the subplot involving his relationship with Faye shows how the young Bruce could be cold and distant, and more than a little self-centered. Basically, you get to see Bruce as a real guy, which is what’s always made him so valuable; his grounded, relatable approach to the outlandish, unrelatable profession of rock star.
It would have been very easy for Springsteen to stick the Nebraska demos in a drawer somewhere so he could immediately release the far more commercial Born in the U.S.A. Deliver Me From Nowhere depicts the choice to stick with difficult, uncommercial material as an act of artistic heroism. That should make the movie a story about sticking to your creative guns and refusing to bow to commercial pressure. The best thing you can say about this movie is that its structure mirrors that message perfectly. The worst thing you can say about it is that a fair number of its individual beats do not.
RATING: 6/10
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere plays this week at the New York Film Festival. It is scheduled to open in theaters on October 24.
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