That’s why they call him the Boss: In Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, our man Bruce—played by a suitably coiffed and toned Jeremy Allen White, an actor who was born to frown while wearing leather jackets—leverages his burgeoning celebrity status against control-freak tendencies that’d probably get a lesser artist booted from their label. It’s 1981, and “Hungry Heart” is on every radio in America—except Bruce’s, that is. He doesn’t want to hear the song’s cheerful hook, nor write another one like it; instead, his ambition is to deliver a collection of stark, haunting American Gothics about thrill killers, economic hardship, and daddy issues. Darned if he’s going to let his troupe of producers and studio engineers—the best ones that money can buy—smooth out the music’s rough edges.
Ideally, a parable about the personal and professional perils of experimentation would take some risks of its own. Deliver Me From Nowhere, though, offers only lavish and ingratiating clichés. It’ll probably be more successful for it, a grim irony given its theme of stringent non-compromise. The issue isn’t so much that the story being told isn’t authentic—the script is faithfully adapted from Warren Zanes’s 2023 Springsteen biography of the same name, which includes plenty of first-person reminiscences from its subject—but that the presentation confers an uncanny sense of artificiality, like a four-track home recording fed through Pro Tools. We get solemn, black-and-white flashbacks to Bruce’s abusive childhood and swoony interludes at a deserted boardwalk amusement park with Faye (Odessa Young), a completely invented love interest who talks and acts like one. Even if it’s become lazy to invoke Walk Hard every time an alpha-male rocker gets immortalized on-screen, the literal-mindedness on display here is occasionally worthy of Dewey Cox; after deciding that he’s determined to make the most personal music of his career, Bruce goes to his notebook of lyrics and rewrites the songs so they’re in the first person.
It doesn’t help that the flatness of Cooper’s filmmaking is exacerbated by the inclusion of clips from a pair of genuinely great movies: Charles Laughton’s poetic, child’s-eye thriller The Night of the Hunter—a favorite of Bruce’s troubled father (Stephen Graham), who’s shown taking his kid to see a formative screening while skipping work—and Terrence Malick’s Badlands, rightly invoked as an inspiration on Nebraska, although it seems unlikely that Springsteen encountered the movie for the first time in 1981 (as suggested by the film) when he recorded a pretty good song called “Badlands” three years earlier. Kudos to Cooper for giving love to the classics, but his own image-making skills are strictly functional. By comparison, James Mangold’s Dylan portrait, A Complete Unknown—a film that ends by showing the freewheeling Bob Dylan driving down the literal middle of the road—feels inspired. Meanwhile, Michael Gracey’s Better Man (the one with the CGI chimpanzee Robbie Williams—remember?) remains the gold standard for hot-wiring the format by taking its conventions for a joyride. Deliver Me From Nowhere is so resolutely on-beat that it suggests the cinematic equivalent of a drum machine; Springsteen’s long-tenured drummer, Max Weinberg, a master of improvisation, would probably get restless and start gnawing on his sticks by the end of the first act.
There is, perhaps, something to be said for taking Bruce Springsteen at face value. For all his gifts of slipping into characters, his appeal (as opposed to Dylan’s) is very much a matter of what you see is what you get. There’s certainly nothing wrong with White’s performance, which is not only physically and vocally credible—he does all his own singing, including a stadium-sized rendition of “Born to Run” near the film’s beginning—but skillful enough to give the movie at least the pretense of a real character study. It takes an awful lot of charisma to redeem a moment like the one where Bruce responds to a car salesman’s sly, sotto voce acknowledgment (“I know you who you are”) by answering, “That makes one of us,” but White sells the corniness by lacing it with frustration: not just the irritation of a self-styled loner at being recognized everywhere he goes, but the expectation—stoked by the acclaim lobbed at Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River—that he’s supposed to carry himself like a sage.
The search for identity is a main theme of Zanes’s book, as is the anxiety of heading down that particular road in the first place. Springsteen has spoken openly about his struggles with depression and the “black sludge” that he felt was on the verge of swallowing him whole; when White isn’t on-screen, the other characters—first and foremost Bruce’s manager and confidant, Jon Landau, played by a perpetually turtlenecked Jeremy Strong—are conversing in hushed tones about what might be wrong with Bruce. But the scenes between Landau and his wife, Barbara (Grace Gummer), are particularly egregious, unfolding so inorganically that it feels like eavesdropping on a table read. When Jon puts on his game face to talk David Krumholtz’s disbelieving record exec off the ledge—not only about Nebraska’s lo-fi aesthetic but its maker’s steadfast refusal to tour it or release any singles—the exchange is designed to flatter the filmmakers’ (and the audience’s) 20/20 hindsight about the album in question being a classic rather than realistically dramatize the size and stakes of Springsteen’s gamble. Ditto the bit where Jon gets chewed out on the phone by Jimmy Iovine about how one of the songs Bruce is less enthusiastic about—a little number called “Born in the U.S.A.”—sounds like it could be a hit. That pain in your ribs is Cooper nudging you with a sledgehammer.
In truth, the recording of “Born in the U.S.A.” at the Power Station in New York is probably Deliver Me From Nowhere’s most exultant scene, not least of all because it documents the pleasure and potency of collaboration—not only did the song sound better in full regalia, but the gleaming production turned it into a Trojan earworm burrowing through various strata of all-American bitterness and xenophobia. There’s a kernel of a complex, affecting idea in Cooper’s script about the intrinsic relationship between integrity and megalomania, but the film is too timid to ever really depict Bruce as an asshole. Instead, it rationalizes his stubbornness as a by-product of genius and leaves it at that. That’s also why his relationship with Faye falls flat; because she’s a composite figure—a wholesome groupie with a cool record collection (Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, Chuck Berry) and an adorable daughter—she can hold her lover to account for his selfish and evasive behavior without really damaging our feelings. Faye tells Bruce that she isn’t just there for him to try playing house, but in the movie’s structure, that’s exactly what she’s there for; she’s a cipher who dispenses advice in between diner shifts about the necessity for this multimillionaire to get his shit together. She’s then abandoned so that he can do just that—and then, it’s implied, be enough at peace with his demons to become a global superstar, happily ever after.
When the trailer of Deliver Me From Nowhere was released back in June, social media had fun with Landau’s monologue about how, by making Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen was “repairing a hole in himself,” and that “once he’s done that, he’s going to repair the entire world.” The scene was ultimately cut before the movie’s premiere at the New York Film Festival, but in retrospect, this was probably a mistake. It turns out the banality of the dialogue, coupled with the almost self-parodic seriousness of the line reading itself, was a perfect encapsulation of the final product.