When Bob Dylan’s Timothée Chalamet-starring biopic A Complete Unknown arrived to universal acclaim last year, it played like a breath of fresh and honest air amongst the glut of recent music stories given the glitzy, Hollywood treatment. The difference, you suspected, was twofold: Dylan had already sold his catalogue to Sony Music, meaning there was far less of a financial carrot involved in presenting only his best side, and regardless, the famously crotchety legend had never really cared about giving the people what they want anyway.
The same, alas, cannot be said for Deliver Me From Nowhere: Bruce Springsteen’s step into the saturated biopic market, that details the New Jersey hero’s troubled period spent making acoustic left-turn album Nebraska in the early ‘80s. It’s not that The Boss – played stoically by The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White – always comes across like a solid gold guy. His on-off relationship with romantic interest Faye (newcomer Odessa Young, who gives the role a convincing air of frustration) is far from love’s young dream, even if they spend half their scenes skipping, romcom-style, around a fairground.
Instead, there’s an unwillingness to really dig into the meat of it all, director Scott Cooper making confusing cuts just when the emotions are about to get real. One scene, in which Bruce and his father Douglas (Stephen Graham) have a harrowed fantasy interaction, following a series of black and white flashbacks played opposite young actor Matthew Anthony Pellicano, is immediately offset by a scene of the musician’s label listening to Nebraska and hating it, to hoots of laughter from the London Film Festival audience. Other moments are painfully on the nose. In the midst of his turmoil, Springsteen speeds increasingly recklessly down an open road, one wrong move away from a crash; in the next scene, he is sat listening and professing his appreciation of the band Suicide.
Amongst all of this, the golden moments are within the music. White, playing in Cincinnati Stadium or recording Born In The USA in a magical studio scene, really captures the edge-of-seat energy of The Boss. Similarly, the more muso-leaning threads of Nebraska’s recording, and the scene’s dedicated to the actual craft of laying such a raw record down whilst keeping that intimacy intact, will tickle Springsteen’s legions of fans. Amongst Deliver Me From Nowhere’s more heavy-handed moments, these episodes feel thoughtful and real. But much like any artist profile, you can’t just fill it with ‘how’s, you also need the ‘why’s, and that’s where things flounder.
The ever-soulful Graham is the exception here. An actor with the ability to bring vulnerability and grit to everything he does, he brings Douglas to life as a damaged man all-too-predictably taking his own problems out on those around him; his moments take the production out of Hollywood and back down to earth. But as Springsteen, White’s emotions are so buried - under the surface; under a script that doesn’t want to examine them too intricately and put the results directly into Springsteen’s mouth - that it’s hard to really invest in the central tenet of the plot. Instead, it’s left to manager Jon Landau (Succession’s Jeremy Strong) to step in and almost fill in the emotional gaps in a series of conversations with his wife. “He feels guilty, he’s worried about success,” he muses at one point. As the old narrative conceit states: don’t tell us, show us.
There’s a good story in this knotty, tide-shifting period of the musician’s life, and lord knows Springsteen is charismatic and interesting enough to carry a biopic. But for an artist beloved for telling stories that get to the gritty heart of the matter, Deliver Me From Nowhere all-too-often swerves the real punches.
In cinemas from October 24
