In 1981, Bruce Springsteen found himself at a crossroads. He’d just finished his tour for The River, which had brought his marathon-length, rock & roll-revivalist shows to a record number of audiences. The E Street Band was hitting on all cylinders. “Hungry Heart” was his first single to crack the Top Five on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. His record label’s commitment to nurturing his career and breaking him into the big leagues had finally paid off. Springsteen was now poised to be a superstar — not the new Dylan or the next Elvis, but fulfilling his destiny to become the long-awaited messiah known as “Bruuuuuce.” And the man who would be the Boss was truly, madly, deeply confused about what to do next.
Fame did not become him. Nor did hearing his own voice blasting out of the radio, preaching about how you lay down your money and you play your part. So Bruce retreated to a rental in Colts Neck, New Jersey. He sat in with local bar bands at the Stone Pony, happy to be just another working musician cranking out Little Richard covers. He read the short stories of Flannery O’Connor. He brought in a newfangled home-recording device called the TEAC 144, in case he felt like cutting demos for the boys. He thought about his childhood, how dancing with his mother in their old living room gave him such joy, and how his father inspired such fear and dread in him as a kid.
And late one night, Bruce happened to catch Badlands, Terrence Malick’s 1973 movie that dramatized the killing spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, on TV. A rabbit hole appeared before him. Soon, he picked up his guitar and began singing: “He saw her standing/On her front porch/Just a-twirlin’/Her baton.” A few days later, after working out more of the song he initially called “Starkweather,” Bruce changed that “he” in the first line to “I” — the stark, old-weird-America death trip made personal. Then our hero went wandering down a path that would eventually cause the record company to lose their shit, force his manager Jon Landau to defend his friend’s artistic integrity, risk alienating his fan base, and produce the bleakest and arguably best front-to-back masterpiece of his discography to date.
Even casual students of Springsteenology 101 know the when, why, and how behind this outlier of a record, not to mention what lay just beyond the horizon. Which doesn’t keep Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere from laying out all of the details about the making of Nebraska, his 1982 album that gave a voice to unrepentant murderers, tortured highway patrolmen, wannabe mobsters, car thieves, and Bruce’s own conflicted memories about his childhood. (Nor does it stop Disney, the company releasing the movie, from asking folks to “refrain from revealing spoilers, cameos, character developments, and detailed story points” — easily the biggest laugh we’ve had in the year of our Lord 2025.) Based on Warren Zanes’ invaluable book of the same name, writer-director Scott Cooper’s thinly sliced biopic-in-miniature boils everything down to a pivotal year in Bruce’s life, right before the Boss is about to go stratospheric. First, however, the rock star has to come perilously close to hitting rock bottom.
And who better to play a moody, mercurial Bruce than Jeremy Allen White? Never mind The Bear — meet the Boss, fighting the same demons and nagging feelings of self-doubt that would cause Carmy Berzatto to stoically nod in recognition. Thankfully, White does not try to mount an impersonation of Springsteen; other than some onstage jumps and a brief, raspy post-concert exchange, there’s no real attempt to “do” Bruce. (Though the idea of releasing a soundtrack of the actor singing Nebraska tracks is certainly … a choice.) White smartly leans into an overall loner vibe that suggests someone lost in the wilderness of his own isolation. Springsteen was famous enough to get recognized by a car salesman and passersby, yet still local enough to sit in every Sunday night with your basic around-the-way rockers. He’s fighting what’s coming and figuring out where he fits in. “I know who you are,” that salesman admits. “That makes one of us,” Springsteen replies.
Deliver Me From Nowhere actually works best when you forget you’re watching a biopic — an irony, considering the title and marketing — and focus on one of the other half dozen genres that Cooper and Co. are serving up. It’s a process movie keen on showing you how Springsteen recorded a handful of spare, sketch-like takes of “Atlantic City,” “Mansion on the Hill,” and “Nebraska” in his bedroom, as well as the way he and his cohort fought to preserve the crude vibe of those four-track demos, modern sound mixes be damned. It’s a character study about a small-town guy trying to hold on to where he came from so he can stay grounded about where he’s going. It’s a Greek tragedy given a serious Gothic makeover, with black-and-white flashbacks depicting a young Bruce (Matthew Anthony Pellicano Jr.) living in the shadow of an imposing, menacing father (Stephen Graham, great as always) and a protective mother (Gaby Hoffmann). Family ties and Working Class USA environments are a Cooper specialty — see Out of the Furnace, Black Mass, Crazy Heart — and these scenes both stick out from the rest of the storytelling and bring out the best in the filmmaker.
And it’s a love story, though not between Bruce and his girlfriend Faye Romano (Odessa Young), a composite of, per his memoir, “the perfectly fine women” he “roughly failed … over and over again.” Deliver is, at its core, a tribute to the bond between Springsteen and Jon Landau, played here by Jeremy Strong with big hang-dog energy. A manager, a consigliere, a confidant, a guardian angel, and a brick wall separating Bruce from the Columbia Records brass, Landau is the best friend a self-sabotaging rock star could ask for. Even when he hears the future, in the form of the E Street Band’s first stab at recording “Born in the U.S.A.,” this loyal advocate stands by his man. You’ll get your blockbuster, company suits, but this is the next album. Yes, this is what it sounds like. No, there won’t be press, or tours, or sex-symbol poses on the cover. Landau is not in the music business. He’s in the Bruce Springsteen business, and what the Boss wants, the Boss is gonna get.
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You wonder if something similar didn’t transpire with film executives as well, who thought they were getting the next cradle-to-grave musical-superhero extravaganza here — a Boss-hemian Rhapsody. After seeing an early re-creation of that final River tour concert, with the final minutes of “Born to Run” getting the full Queen-at-Live-Aid treatment, they were probably levitating out of their seats. By the time they get to tiny, monochromatic Bruce cowering next to his pops while watching Night of the Hunter, their response could have been an encore from ’82: “So this is the biopic, and it’s going to be a trauma drama that looks and sounds like this?” It’s probably the only movie about a rock star in which the payoff isn’t gold records but going to therapy and seeing a grown man sit on his elderly dad’s lap. The money shot isn’t a fist held high in the sold-out arena air. It is a moment in which, to paraphrase the Bible: Bruce wept.
There is also, of course, the 100 million-dollar question: What will Springsteen fans think of this? Some will find it dour to a fault. We don’t blame them. Others will wish it had more sequences like the one in the Power Station, where Bruce and the band tear into “Born in the U.S.A.” and heed Landau’s corny demand to “burn it down.” We don’t blame them either, though despite the movie’s flaws, what Cooper has given audiences here is way more compelling than a live-action greatest-hits compilation.
Many, however, will likely appreciate how well the film reflects not the early-1980s Bruce but the one circa the 2020s, who’s become remarkably reflective and honest about himself in his autumn years. Deliver Me From Nowhere is a story about an artist following his muse off a cliff. The fact that you know he parachutes to safety and produces an enduring work sans compromise gives it a default happy ending. But what it’s really doing is presenting a portrait of a slow-motion nervous breakdown that’s narrowly avoided, and only because the subject was willing to finally reckon with his past. The song that comes to mind at the end of this isn’t from Nebraska. It’s from the title track of an album he’d put out 40 years later, one in which the hero is “wearing a cross of my calling/On wheels of fire I come rolling down here.” Poised to became the savior of rock & roll, Bruce fell into a hole. Then he exorcised something via these dark dirges from the edge of his psyche, and you realize you’ve spent two hours watching him come on up for the rising.
From Rolling Stone US
