Collar? Popped. Hands? Deep in the pockets of a leather jacket. Posture? Hunched somewhere between man and folding chair. Jeremy Allen White makes for a perfectly convincing Bruce Springsteen in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. Slide some brown contacts in there, and his soulful, kicked-dog expression can do the rest; hand him a guitar and he’ll croak out the side of his mouth like his voice, too, is rising straight up from the New Jersey soil.
Scott Cooper’s film is about the genesis of Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska, made at what everyone thought would be the height of the artist’s fame, off the back of 1980’s chart-topper The River. Instead, he rebuked all that with an intimate, folk-rooted ode to the blue-collar worker that consolidated his artistic integrity, all while Columbia’s executives snapped feverishly at the gates.
Cooper spends much of Deliver Me from Nowhere’s runtime convincing us of White’s transformation, as he stares gloomily out of car windows, or across homestead balconies and half-abandoned boardwalks. Unfortunately, the rest, all that stuff that lives inside the mind, is reduced in his script to the same pop psychology we’ve come to expect from a music biopic.
Nebraska – and the depth of its engagement with history, class, and Catholic doom – has become, via black-and-white flashbacks, the product of pure childhood trauma. Enter, stage left, Stephen Graham as Springsteen’s father, Doug. Graham is the actor you phone up if you want a character to be muddled in the cycle of self-hatred and violence. He does the grunt work, while the film cuts out all the hard, messy parts of confronting abuse. Instead, it offers us three easy steps: acknowledge, cry it out in therapy, and then forgive.
Deliver Me from Nowhere, ultimately, is invested more in the anguish itself, as White broods and alienates Faye (Odessa Young), a composite of all the women Springsteen feels he let down in this period. She begs from the sidelines, “I just wish that you’d let me in!” In turn, the film feels oddly conflict-free: our hands are held tight like we’re preschoolers crossing the road, as Springsteen catches Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) on television and heads to the library to research its real-life inspiration, writing in his notebook things like, “Why??’ and “double album??”.
Certainly, it’s unusual (and refreshingly so!) to see a biopic depict a union between artist and manager as tender and trusting as the one between Springsteen and Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong, whose full-body impersonation hits like a cannonball). Yet Landau’s steadfastness throughout Nebraska’s tricky conception – in short, Springsteen recorded demos in his Colts Neck home but didn’t like how they sounded in the studio – ultimately gives him little to do but traipse around town and praise his client’s singularity. Occasionally, he’ll go home to his wife (Grace Gummer) and use her as a sounding board. “It sounds like he’s pushing boundaries,” she’ll reply, like she’s ChatGPT summarising his argument.
It’s curious, in that respect, that Deliver Me from Nowhere is the rare biopic in which its famous musician never interacts with other famous musicians (outside of his own band). Stevie Nicks is mentioned once, but never materialises. Cooper fails to firmly place his subject within any of the creative scenes around him, at least not in the way that, for all its faults, last year’s A Complete Unknown sought to understand how Bob Dylan shaped and was shaped by the American folk tradition. Deliver Me from Nowhere’s Springsteen is untouchable and untethered – little more than a bundle of hurt feelings floating aimlessly across the Garden State.
Dir: Scott Cooper. Starring: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham, Odessa Young. Cert 12A, 119 minutes.
‘Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere’ is in cinemas from 24 October
