Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere Review

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere tells a small story, hidden between the glitz and glamour of a larger-than-life personality. Jeremy Allen White plays Bruce Springsteen as he concludes his most successful tour to-date and returns home to New Jersey. Put up in a rental house by his label in Colts Neck, Bruce endures the screeching halt of post-tour life as his management team, represented by the empathetic Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), encourages him to get to work on his next release for Columbia Records. What follows is director Scott Cooper’s attempt to create a story, based on the Warren Zanes’ book of the same name, about untreated depression and the importance of building a life that takes care of you.

In the film, Bruce struggles to rest after his exhausting tour as he immediately gets to work on his next record. Back in the part of Jersey that he grew up in, memories of his childhood with his abusive father haunt him. To distract himself, Bruce starts jamming with a local band at their weekly residency, chasing the high of performing and feeling loved while on stage. After a show, he meets a fan named Faye (Odessa Young), a waitress at a local diner who is raising her child with her extended family after being abandoned by her partner. Believing that this relationship could distract him from his past, Bruce starts dating Faye.

Juggling Bruce’s haunting memories, his new relationship, and the all-consuming process of preparing a double album worth of demos, director Cooper’s efforts to weave the dark, the hopeful, and the mundane are valiant but less than successful. The memories, portrayed throughout the film in black-and-white in typical flashback fashion, work well to establish Bruce’s father, portrayed by Stephen Graham, as a mentally unwell person medicating himself with alcohol and ties that in with Bruce’s own issues with work-as-self-medication. Graham’s scenes, with both young Bruce in flashbacks and a couple scenes with present-day Bruce, are simply shot, yet resonate powerfully. This emotionally rich connection represents the heart of the film’s story, but this plot must take a backseat to two storylines that seem more important: the romance story with Faye and the core thrust of the action in the making of the album Nebraska.

These stories have some benefit in illustrating the character of Bruce, but they mainly feel like a retread of the stereotypical scenes in a generic musician biopic, which the film otherwise tries to transcend. Odessa Young does good work portraying Faye, the only fictional character in the story, but the film truncates the relationship to make a point about Bruce’s inability to reconnect. The scenes we do get with Faye are ripped straight out of an undercooked, shmaltzy dating montage, and giving that much screentime to a fictional character who disappears two-thirds into the film makes the whole story feel unwarranted. For a film that’s also getting hyperspecific into the life of Bruce Springsteen, this made-up relationship plot gets in the way of significant screentime with real people who had a deep connection to Bruce, like the members of his band.

The making of Nebraska falls into a common trap that is always of concern when making musician biopics: the visual manifestation of watching someone create music. While big Springsteen fans will love the easter eggs of Bruce lore woven throughout this film, watching a man read an article about spree killer Charles Starkweather and write the words “murder,” “motive,” and “why???” on a piece of paper does not make the most compelling cinema—although scoring the production of the vinyl record to “I’m On Fire” is a fantastic, literal needle drop. This part of the story showcases Jeremy Allen White’s efforts to perform and sing Bruce’s songs and give the musician biopic its required jukebox excitement, but the parlor trickery of this effort doesn’t add much to our investment into Bruce as a character. Most of the characters in this plot go without almost any meaningful dialogue, only speaking in technical terms about the process of making the record. The only character with any emotional connection to Bruce in this part of the film is Jeremy Strong’s Jon Landau, who is played with such an acute strangeness that the whole performance feels surreal. Bruce and Jon’s connection comes across as genuine, but while it runs the gamut of the whole film it ends up playing a supporting role to the album’s creation.

This balancing of the three distinct aspects of Bruce’s life ultimately becomes too much for Cooper to manage as he tries to give Bruce’s paternal trauma, his romance, and the creation of his iconic album equal footing in a film that would’ve benefitted from sticking to just one idea. Deliver Me From Nowhere showcases a rough collection of decent stories from Bruce’s life that could’ve all been given the feature treatment: Bruce falling in love off the road, Bruce reconciling with his father, or Bruce and Jon’s supporting each other while attempting a career-defining experiment against all odds. However, like most big-budget musician biopics, the audience wants everything and this particular genre feels compelled to deliver everything, so what does the film do? It gives us everything it can while also trying to transcend the stereotypes, but not too much where it won’t be a mass-market success. The result: a mishmash of stories that don’t get enough time to be fully fleshed out.

More so than most, Bruce Springsteen deserved to have his work tackled on the big screen. His oeuvre brings together cinematic images of working class Americana and a poignant analysis of the contradictions between the American dream and its reality in a way that screams “Hollywood!” Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere attempts to paint Bruce’s life with the same romantic flourishes that define his work, but rather than capturing the truth or transcending it, the film struggles to figure out what to do with it. 

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