A big part of Bruce Springsteen manager Jon Landau’s job is to say no to things. As “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” producer Eric Robinson describes, he has spent his career being a “force field” for The Boss, deflecting countless attempts over the years to fictionalize Springsteen’s story on the big screen. As a result, Robinson went into the process of making a Bruce Springsteen biopic knowing it was a “nigh impossibility.”
But with the release of “Deliver Me from Nowhere” this past weekend, Robinson and his partner Ellen Goldsmith-Vein found a way to get Springsteen to say yes. They did so by combining an adaptation of biographer Warren Zanes’ book with the vision of “Crazy Heart” director Scott Cooper to deliver to Landau and Springsteen their version of the “anti-rock” biopic that he would actually approve.
“What it really illustrates is the artist as a human at this very transitional point in his life, both creatively and personally, where he was confronting his past demons and trauma and the ghosts of his childhood, and alchemized them through his art into this masterpiece of ‘Nebraska,’” Robinson told IndieWire. “On its face, you could dismiss it and be like, well, it’s just a movie about a guy sitting in a bedroom with a guitar. How cinematic is that?”
“Deliver Me from Nowhere” begins at the end of Springsteen’s tour in support of “The River” in 1981. He was loved critically because of “Born to Run,” and he had a charting single from “The River” with “Hungry Heart,” and the record label wanted more. And though he was sitting on a bona fide smash with “Born to Run,” he was determined for his next album to be “Nebraska,” a stripped down, rustic, acoustic album he recorded without the E Street Band and was instead an album of his demos that were richer and more evocative than what he could accomplish in the studio.
Robinson heard Zanes discussing his Springsteen biography, also titled “Deliver Me from Nowhere,” in 2023 on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast, and he could tell there was a film there that could capture a unique slice of Springsteen’s life rather than try and be a cradle to grave biopic. While they eventually developed a close relationship with Zanes, he wasn’t willing to go to Landau and Springsteen nor give them the rights to his book until they had something more to their idea.
“Warren did not want to just go to Bruce with this, like, ‘Hey, these two producers like my book and think there’s a movie.’ They would just say fuck off. They wouldn’t even pay attention,” Robinson said. “So the two of us felt, let’s make this a stronger package. Let’s make this easier for them to digest.”
In approaching Cooper, they felt his films like “Crazy Heart,” “Out of the Furnace,” and “Hostiles” all captured the themes of male friendship and mental health that they believed Zanes’ “Deliver Me from Nowhere” examined. They pitched to him that they wanted to make the antithesis of “Rocket Man” or “Bohemian Rhapsody” and embraced the idea in was on board in the course of a weekend.
It was only after Cooper became involved that Zanes felt comfortable approaching both Landau and Springsteen. Cooper flew out to New Jersey to meet with Springsteen and explained his vision for a film that would be free of “bombast” and have the rawness and vulnerability of the “Nebraska” album. He explained how the film would be infused with black and white in flashback scenes and would not shy away from his troubled relationship with his father or the other ghosts of his past. Bruce was in.
“This is a film, a very intimate story, about a man, it could be anyone, who is struggling with mental health issues. So inasmuch as it could be categorized as a music biopic, I really think it’s so much more than that,” Goldsmith-Vein said. “Seeing this film, it is an opportunity for people to talk about this in a way that maybe they haven’t before.”
Over the course of several rounds of the script, Cooper again would travel to New Jersey and Madrid to sit with Springsteen to go through the script line by line, not for his approval but to lend it more authenticity. Robinson defends that scenes of a flashback involving a young Bruce hitting his dad with a baseball bat, or another of a now-adult Springsteen sitting on his father’s lap after a show, all happened exactly as Springsteen described.
Springsteen did license his music previously to the jukebox musical “Blinded by the Light,” but Robinson believes if you were to ask Springsteen, it’s this story in particular that truly personifies him.
“We’ve seen the story of a guy struggling to figure out who he was, he does it, and then he becomes this rock star, and it’s sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” Robinson said. “That’s not Bruce, and it never has been. Bruce is vulnerable, he’s open, he’s raw. That’s why his audience loves him so much.”
“Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” is in theaters now.