Jeremy Allen White and Odessa Young in “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.” MUST CREDIT: 20th Century Studios Jeremy Allen White and Odessa Young in “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.” MUST CREDIT: 20th Century Studios
In most biopics, when a rock star drops cold cash on a hot car, things tend to be looking up. Not for Bruce Springsteen.
In Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere – about the making of his fraught 1982 album, Nebraska – our hero splurges on a Camaro with an ink-black paint job as dark as his headspace.
He’s fresh off a successful tour, struggling to settle into the autumnal quiet of New Jersey, and when the buttoned-down car salesman tells Springsteen that he knows who he is, the Boss responds with a folksy grunt: “Well, that makes one of us.” On the drive home, he flicks the radio on, hears the DJ introducing one of his songs, then abruptly shuts it off.
The promise being made to the audience on that car lot has nothing to do with APR financing. Instead, it’s that, yes, this beloved giant of American song WILL eventually figure out who he is – but we’re going to have to spend a couple of hours plowing through the murk to get there.
With Deliver Me From Nowhere, director-screenwriter Scott Cooper has chosen to elongate a particularly shadowy chapter of Springsteen’s creative life – much of it based on a book of the same title by Warren Zanes – resulting in a slow, moody, occasionally ponderous film about the nonlinear act of music making.
Yes, there are a few re-enactments of screamy concerts and stressful studio sessions, but the most meaningful scenes unfold inside the tidy waterfront home where Springsteen recorded Nebraska on a four-track tape machine – if not inside the unknowable loneliness of a songwriter’s head.
Those structural tweaks are entirely welcome because, let’s face it, the rock-and-roll biopic is a cursed form.
Typically, when Hollywood’s power players call on an actor to dramatise the life of, say, a scientist, or a venture capitalist, everybody’s happy. Even when those kinds of protagonists are household names, audiences often have little idea of what they look like, talk like, sing like, dance like.
With supernova musicians, it couldn’t be more different. Our deep fluency in their individual physicality makes it nearly impossible for us to suspend our disbelief.
With Deliver Me From Nowhere, the task feels especially grueling for poor Jeremy Allen White in that his subject still rocks among us. At 76, Springsteen is still out there, still touring, still moving his muscles to loud rhythms under bright lights.
Cooper, who directed Jeff Bridges in the 2009 country music drama Crazy Heart, seems to understand this. So instead of building this film up to a climactic arena concert, he opens with one, allowing Allen White to take his very best shot at Springsteenian catharsis straight out of the gate.
Fool’s errand, noble effort. But with Born to Run out of the way, he’s now free to mop up his sweat and begin brooding his way toward the story’s ambiguous centre.
Springsteen’s house has huge windows, but it still feels dark. A book of Flannery O’Connor stories lies heavy on the coffee table. Terrence Malick’s serial killer noir Badlands flickers on the television.
It’s here that the Boss starts demoing ballads for his new album, and when he hears how raw everything sounds in playback, he gets excited, but just barely.
This new music sounds “like it’s from the past or something”, he says, listening to his acoustic guitar shiver through tape hiss. As his brain floats back and forth between creative delirium and wordless depression, Allen White maintains a look of handsome bewilderment – the resting chef face he’s cultivated throughout four seasons of The Bear.
When a love interest, Faye Romano, played by Odessa Young, wanders into the plot, she feels obligatory and not quite real, perhaps because she’s a fictional composite of Springsteen’s real-life, nonbinding romances from that time. No matter. The real love story here is between Springsteen and his unflappable manager, Jon Landau, played with stony commitment by Jeremy Strong.
Prone to translating Springsteen’s state of being to his wife as if speaking to a documentary film-maker, Landau flatly tells her how “success is complicated for Bruce”, and how his songs are now channeling something “darker”, and how Springsteen came from a certain type of world that he suddenly “feels guilty” leaving behind.
Maybe this is just how managers talk about the rock stars who pay them. Or maybe movies about those very rock stars remain littered with cliches because real life is similarly trashy.
For all its subtle magnetisms, Deliver Me From Nowhere also deploys relentless black-and-white flashbacks to childhood traumas; various plotty obstacles in art making that require heroic solutions; even an anomalous, music video-ish scene in which Springsteen hallucinates he’s strumming his guitar inside a room that’s on fire.
But at its most consistent, this is a movie about listening. The characters often listen – to music, to each other – with great focus, and it seems to transform them in unspoken ways.
At one point, Springsteen sprawls out next to the living room stereo and blasts a song by the visionary proto-punk duo Suicide, violently tapping the song’s mechanical beat into his sternum and declaring it the best album he’s ever heard.
If we try, in turn, to heighten our looking, we might notice the film speaking to us with its colours: On the verge of realising that Springsteen’s demo tape is going to become his new album proper, we begin seeing the same red that will soon adorn the cover art of Nebraska. A red studio door. Red knobs on kitchen cabinets. A red telephone. His red corduroy shirt.
Through it all, was anyone listening or looking as carefully as the Boss himself? Springsteen was reportedly a frequent visitor on the set of Deliver Me From Nowhere – undoubtedly pumping up the extras, and presumably stressing out the actors.
Was he there to be flattered? Is that what this whole thing is for? Over the past decade, Springsteen has written a generous memoir, then transposed it into a Broadway performance residency, then filmed it for a Netflix special, and now he’s back on tour, speaking righteous truth to power between songs. He must feel known, loved, understood.
Why bother funneling all of that through Hollywood’s pomp and corniness into a movie that’s only half good?
Nebraska was a triumph because it refused to fulfill anyone’s expectations. Deliver Me From Nowhere valourises that decision while missing its chance to do the same.