Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere Isn’t the Definitive Bruce Biopic — But Doesn’t Try to Be: Review

The biggest challenge one faces while watching Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is Jeremy Allen White’s eyes. The actor, having been launched into stardom with his tour de force work on FX’s The Bear, is without question committed to his portrayal of Bruce Springsteen — the movie unveils him with a bang, rocking his heart out and his ass off with a live performance of “Born to Run,” sweat pouring off him with the effort. Yet while physically, White does his best to resemble one of New Jersey’s most beloved sons, it’s pretty much impossible to get around the eyes. White has great eyes… They’re simply not Bruce’s. No matter how much he squints.

Still, the new biopic has clearly learned its lessons from past movies, keeping its focus relatively tight rather than trying to unpack the full scope of Springsteen’s life. It chooses a particularly intriguing period of time to explore, too — using Warren Zanes’s Deliver Me from Nowhere as its source material, the movie spotlights the creation of the album Nebraska, putting the creative process front and center while also doing its best to reveal the complicated emotions that Springsteen was exploring in his ad-hoc bedroom studio, while faced with a creative turning point.

A movie like this needs some sort of central tension to drive the story forward, and in this case the crux of Nowhere focuses on just how challenging an experience the album was, from Springsteen’s initial conception of what he wanted to do with these songs, to the struggle to translate that to his specifications. Writer/director Scott Cooper really glories in those details, from the rudimentary four-track set-up Springsteen used for recording the initial Colts Neck demo tape to the channel-flipping that gave him at least one point of inspiration. (It appears that in 1981, New Jersey TV stations were playing the movie Badlands on a loop.)

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We watch Bruce write and then edit in spiral-bound notebooks with felt tip pens, in one case changing the lyrics for “Nebraska” from the third person to the first person — making the song’s story of murderer Charles Starkweather all the more haunting. Prior to that, we watched Bruce research the Starkweather killings at the local library, scanning through old newspapers on microfiche. For an instant, it almost feels like the movie’s about to shift into the direction of true crime, which would have been a totally bonkers but arguably intriguing direction for things to go. Bruce Springsteen Investigates — there’s gotta be a streaming service that’ll buy that.

Gearheads and sound nerds — which is to say, the core Consequence readership, thank you for reading this far — would probably have enjoyed one or two more scenes exploring the difficulties of transferring Bruce’s original cassette tape demo to vinyl. But for the layperson, there’s more than enough, and it’s genuinely fascinating to see how a combination of analog technology (including a boombox that stopped working temporarily after Bruce and a buddy took it out on a boat) led to a totally unique sound for that period of time. Or anytime, really.

The supporting cast features plenty of familiar faces, from Paul Walter Hauser as the Nebraska recording engineer to Marc Maron as the mixing engineer faced with the seemingly impossible task mentioned above. And Jeremy Strong shows up with an awkward hairpiece and de rigeur turtleneck to play Springsteen’s producer Jon Landau, a steady presence whose defining character trait is believing in Bruce’s talent. However, his faith is shaky at times, and Grace Gummer gets a handful of scenes as Jon’s wife, a character whose only reason for existence is to listen to Jon complain about the challenges of working with Bruce. There’s literally one scene where she doesn’t say a single line of dialogue; she just sits in bed and nods.

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (20th Century Studios)

While Deliver Me from Nowhere manages to avoid many cliches of this genre, there are one or two it doesn’t: Is there some sort of rule that says a man can’t be seen as a tortured musical genius if he isn’t also seen being a shitty boyfriend/husband? Our fictional Bruce is never overtly cruel to Faye (Odessa Young), the pretty single mom he casually dates during this period of time. Yet watching her struggle to maintain his attention, in direct competition with His Art, is one of the biopic traps Cooper can’t escape. Springsteen might be one of rock’s most famous Wife Guys, but this is a Bruce who has not yet met Patti Scialfa (they would connect for the first time a few years later), and also — in the film’s view — has some work to do on himself before being ready for true love.

The other big touchstone of this genre found here is that Bruce facing his complicated relationship with his father (Stephen Graham, another ubiquitous face this year). Black-and-white flashbacks reveal both happy memories as well as abusive ones, as Bruce’s father handled his mental health issues largely by self-medicating with booze; the movie only gives us a child’s understanding of what might be wrong with him, but that fits the nature of the story on some level.

There are numerous small details scattered throughout the movie that hint at a bigger world than what we’re seeing: While not touring, Bruce makes a regular habit of dropping in at his beloved Stone Pony, but we never know more about the band he plays with, aside from their happiness to be jamming semi-regularly with an icon. Jon Landau’s office is filled with records and papers, but none of his artwork is hanging up; instead it’s propped against the walls, as if to say Landau’s too busy to deal with it or unwilling to commit to the space. It’s one of the movie’s strengths, this trust in the audience to understand what’s been left unsaid.

Deliver Me from Nowhere doesn’t aim to be the definitive tale of Bruce Springsteen’s life, but it does make smart choices in trying to subtly showcase the reasons why his legacy extends beyond some great rock songs. It’s a committed portrait of an artist, with White’s devotion to capturing Bruce’s soul almost overcoming the lack of physical resemblance… And you do eventually get used to that. For he’s not trying to be the definitive Bruce Springsteen, either — just a ghost of a man who was lost, and found what he was looking for in his music.

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere arrives in theaters on Friday, October 25th. Check out the trailer below.