‘Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere’ captures the heart of the Boss’s creative process - review

I imagine that that’s just what the film’s writer/director, Scott Cooper, who also made the enjoyable country-music movie, Crazy Heart, would have wanted me to do. That’s because the making of Nebraska is at the heart of the movie, a definite must-see for Springsteen fans, but which I think will be an entertaining film for almost all audiences.

I say “I think” because I’m a pretty ardent fan. While I don’t own all the old albums on vinyl, I listen to them a lot with a friend, and I planned a vacation around seeing one of his shows during his 2023 world tour.

Still, while I can see some weaknesses in this authorized-by-Bruce movie, I think its strengths override them.

The short answer is that it doesn’t match it in terms of placing its subject in a time and a place, and in the context of music history. At times, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere descends into psychobabble and an uninspiring romantic subplot – typical biopic pitfalls that A Complete Unknown did a better job of avoiding.

Going into Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, I worried that I wouldn’t be able to forget his performance as the anxious chef Carmy Berzatto in The Bear, a performance that has made the show into the success that it is.

But White turns out to be perfect as Springsteen, capturing the warring impulses of introspection and a tendency toward depression, with the swagger and joy that comes from expressing himself musically and having his music embraced by his ever-growing public. White is so good, I think now that I’ll see Bruce in Carmy when the next season of The Bear comes out, because who is Carmy if not the Bruce Springsteen of the kitchen?

The movie looks at the period following the success of The River, when Columbia, Springsteen’s label, was pushing him for an even bigger follow-up album. Dogged by memories of his childhood with a mentally ill and sometimes violent father, he felt ambivalent and unworthy of his success.

Instead of plunging headlong into a hedonistic rock-star lifestyle, he retreated to a house in rural New Jersey to record songs he wrote in a burst of creativity, on very basic equipment, but which sounded great. Some, like “Nebraska” and “Atlantic City,” have become an important part of his music catalog.

While there are a few rousing performances in the film of such iconic hits as “Born to Run” and later, “Born in the USA” – and White does a good job at approximating Springsteen’s singing voice – the movie is at its best when it spotlights the creative process that led to Nebraska.

We see him channel-surfing despondently and catching a glimpse of the 1973 Terrence Malick film, Badlands, starring Martin Sheen as the serial killer based on the real-life murderer, Charles Starkweather. Springteen is blown away, leading him to research Starkweather. He identifies with the killer’s rage, and the movie convincingly connects that feeling to his anger at his violent father and his childhood attempts to keep his mother safe.

During this extremely fruitful period, he also wrote the bulk of the songs that became Born in the U.S.A. and contemplated making a double album.

Since it's hard to have a whole movie about a guy making music on a tape recorder in his bedroom, the movie adds a romantic subplot about Springsteen’s relationship with Faye (Odessa Young), a soulful single mom and waitress from his stomping ground of Asbury Park. She looks like a Farrah Fawcett-wannabe but listens to Patti Smith, as well as Bruce’s music, and is a regular at the Stone Pony, a club identified with Springsteen’s early success.

Not surprisingly, he’s a great date – he takes her to a carousel in the middle of the night – and is good with her young daughter. But she exists in the movie mainly for him to pull away from her when his demons torment him.

Watching it, I realized how many of Springsteen’s love songs are tinged with bitterness, and how most of his romantic songs are more about the singer than the object of his affection, like “Tougher than the Rest.” Although they aren’t usually feel-good songs, they more than make up for that with their psychological complexity.

The E Street Band is barely present in the movie, and his future wife, Patti Scialfa, whom he reportedly already knew in this period, is conspicuously absent. Much of the film is about his bromance with journalist-turned-producer Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong, looking suitably serious and intense), who championed his music early on, and who has helped the musician balance writing, recording, and performing all these years.

Landau is Bruce’s protector, fighting the suits like Al Teller (a very engaging David Krumholtz) who aren’t thrilled that their rock star wants to release a low-tech album of introspective music, and which Springsteen refuses to promote.

Teller’s face, as he listens to one of the slower Nebraska songs, is not that of a philistine, but a guy who’s heard a song that sounds draggy to him, as some tend to do. At this point, you’ll forgive yourself if you’ve been longing for some of the high-energy music you know is coming up in Born in the U.S.A.

The conflict between these two sides of the same artist is what drives the plot, and it soars when it looks at this battle through the music. But the arc of Springsteen facing his childhood trauma and going into therapy falls into pedestrian dialogue and clichés. While you root for this troubled young man to heal, the literal-minded way this part of the plot is handled diminishes the movie.

It makes for an interesting contrast with A Complete Unknown, where Dylan just denied his Jewish middle-class background and the movie never showed any of his family. It points to a contrast between the two artists – Dylan constantly reinvents himself, while Springsteen struggles to understand himself. This whole part of the film would be far worse were not for Stephen Graham’s excellent performance as Springsteen’s troubled father, especially in the later scenes.

But overall, this classy, literate script, which features Landau playing Sam Cooke’s “Last Mile of the Way” and quoting Flannery O’Connor to cheer up the despondent rocker, gives good insight into the heart of Springsteen’s creative process.

All in all, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is an engaging movie that takes the music seriously but also has fun with it, and fun is a commodity in extremely short supply in US movies these days. And speaking of fun, it also mentions a piece of trivia I’d never heard before, that “Cover Me” was originally written for Donna Summer. They could have done quite a duet.