Bruce Springsteen has said he approved a new film about his life as it is not actually biopic in the ordinary sense.
The musician is played by Jeremy Allen White in Deliver Me from Nowhere, which explores the period in which he made his 1982 album Nebraska.
This detail is why “Born to Run” singer-songwriter agreed to the film’s production, with Springsteen stating in a Q&A: “I think we had a very specific idea of what we were gonna attempt to do, and, for lack of a better word, it was an anti-biopic.
“It just takes a couple years out of my life,” he said.
Springsteen said the film looks at a time when he went through “some difficult places” when he was in his early thirties.
Director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) said he focused on emulating specific moments that made the record impactful as opposed to Springsteen’s career as a whole.
“I was interested in a man who’s sitting alone in a bedroom with a four-track recorder facing this unresolved trauma and mental health illness asking the questions that we all often ask when we’re lost and we’re facing the sort of issues that really no one else can understand,” he said.
“I knew at that point this was a film I had to make.”
Variety reports that Springsteen praised Cooper for the scenes that show the musician with his father, played in the film by Stephen Graham.
Cooper said the spirit of his own father, who died the day before he started shooting the film, carried him through production.
“In a movie that is about a lot of things, including fathers and son, his spirit carried me through it. And it took me back to understanding what a deeply personal and very specific time this was in Bruce’s life.”
The film, based on Warren Zanes’s novel of the same name, screened at the Telluride Film Festival and will also be shown at New York Film Festival later this month.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere will be released in cinemas on 24 October.
