As a member of the Boss army for the better part of fifty years, I walked into a screening of Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere over the weekend with some measure of trepidation. I wanted to like it, but I knew I might encounter many reasons why I wouldn’t. Written and directed by Scott Cooper, with Jeremy Allen White in the title role, the film is based on Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, the 2024 book by Warren Zanes.
More than just a typical music biopic, Springsteen is a slice of life that spans barely two years and explores the ravages of depression and mental illness – insidious maladies that can cripple even the most charmed lives. For as grim as it might sound – and it is at times – it’s an excellent movie.
The story opens in a concert hall in Cincinnati in 1981 on the last night of the world tour supporting The River, the 1980 album that elevated Springsteen to legit rock-star status with the help of its top ten single, “Hungry Heart.” Within days after the end of the tour, Columbia Records – Springsteen’s label since the beginning of his recording career in 1973 – is asking his manager, Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), “What’s next?” Their boy is on a rocket ride, and whatever new material is in the pipeline has to keep fueling the engine.
But what’s next is uncertain, not just for Landau but for Springsteen himself. The songwriter settles into a rental house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, with a four-track recording machine and picks his way through a few ideas. The process seems aimless until he catches Martin Sheen and Cissy Spacek in a couple scenes from Badlands, the 1973 Terrence Malick film, on late-night TV. Badlands was inspired by real-life serial killers Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, who murdered eleven people in Nebraska and Wyoming between November 1957 and January 1958.
Over the next several days, Springsteen becomes preoccupied if not obsessed with the Starkweather story and starts laying down the barest skeletons of songs with nothing but an acoustic guitar, a harmonica and his voice. The resulting material is dark and haunting, filled with stories of murderers, lost souls and other desperate characters. It’s rough and it’s raw, but he’s completely consumed by the atmosphere he’s creating. “It sounds like it’s coming from the past,” he says.
But the past – specifically his past – is a scary place. Black and white flashbacks to the 1950s introduce us to a father (Stephen Graham) who is cold and distant, overbearing and unforgiving. Douglas, the elder Springsteen, is a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, ominous figure in the family’s small house in Freehold, New Jersey. The suggestion of physical abuse is ever-present in the retrospective scenes, and eight-year-old Bruce (Matthew Pellicano, Jr.) spends most of his days and nights in a state of low-level but persistent fear.
As the songs slowly come together on 32-year-old Bruce’s four-track recorder, the rest of his life starts to unravel. His days and nights are a blur, he’s unable to articulate his internal struggle – creative and otherwise – to Landau, and a budding romance with a young single mom (Odessa Young) who works as a waitress in a Jersey diner is falling apart. The songs he’s recorded on the four-track machine have opened a door to some extremely uncomfortable truths about himself, his father, and the persistent strain of mental illness that has plagued his family for generations.
When Springsteen’s celebrated E Street Band is only partially successful in its efforts to turn the rough tracks into a fully orchestrated album, the songwriter realizes that the DIY cassette that emerged from the home recording machine is the album, and the album will be called Nebraska. It’s a hard sell to all involved – including the studio engineers who are tasked with boosting the level of sound quality on the cassette to something worthy of a mass-produced vinyl recording – but as Landau declares to one label exec (albeit somewhat melodramatically): “In this office, we believe in Bruce Springsteen.”
Jeremy Allen White is, in fact, a believable Boss. What he may lack in physical resemblance he makes up for with small details like posture, vocal inflection, even the tilt of his head. He occasionally gives us the bigger-than-life onstage persona that the world has come to know from Springsteen, but more often he portrays an artist nearly suffocating under the weight of two overwhelming forces – his prior success and his inner demons. And his vocal performances during the musical sequences are always convincing and sometimes uncanny.
Jeremy Strong as Jon Landau successfully juggles the many roles that every good manager plays – cheerleader, sounding board, consigliere, reality checker, and human shield – but he sometimes delivers his lines like proclamations rather than actual dialogue, like bits of exposition aimed at helping the audience understand Springsteen’s personality and thought process. But when he’s not doing that, the onscreen dynamic that he creates with White successfully conveys the friendship and mutual respect that Landau and Springsteen have shared since the mid-1970s.
Stephen Graham is excellent as Douglas Springsteen, not so much for what he says and does in front of the camera, but for what he doesn’t say and do. He’s stoic, mostly silent. A block of granite with a grim face and a troubled mind. And seen through the eyes of a young boy, he’s scary as hell. In the end, though, father and son make peace in a small but powerful moment that’s consistent with a real-life account in Springsteen’s 2017 autobiography.
The relationship with Faye, the diner waitress, is a little bit troublesome, but not because of any shortcomings on the actor’s part. Odessa Young plays the character with a dignity and grace that transcend her compromised circumstances. But Faye never existed in real life. She’s a purely fictional construct inserted into the story, presumably to illustrate Springsteen’s inability to maintain a meaningful one-on-one emotional connection in the midst of adoration from fans all over the world. But when everything else in a story rings as true as it does in this film, the part that’s made up feels off-key.
Full disclosure: I have not read Zanes’ book, but it’s been moved up to a place very close to the top of my reading pile. I have little doubt that both the book and its film adaptation make up a reasonably accurate representation of the genesis of Nebraska and the mental state of the artist who created it. My takeaway is that Springsteen was in a far more precarious mental space in the early ‘80s than anyone outside of his inner circle even realized.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere speaks volumes about how the creative process can also be a healing process, and how – for those who can summon the courage – there can be a road back from the darkness on the edge of town.