Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, directed by Scott Cooper, is in cinemas now.
Near the end of a movie year that started with a good film about a folk singer going electric comes a lesser but still fan-captivating one about a rock star going acoustic.
Unlike the rel="" title="https://www.nzherald.co.nz/the-listener/entertainment/more-than-another-biopic-timothee-chalamets-uncanny-bob-dylan-performance/MW4P5HDJIRE2PIA7Y7ZO7WDRYU/">Bob Dylan film, this Bruce Springsteen movie attempts to be an untypical biopic, though it’s playing many of those conventional riffs. Ones like having a bright young star – in this case Jeremy Allen White from The Bear – pull all the moves, which he does very well.
Like, giving the audience a big moment in rock history, in this case the first full band recording of Born in the USA. And like having your rock star exist in a world where they are the only rock star on the planet and doesn’t much talk to other musicians.
The fact that the Springsteen character exchanges no words in this film with his backers, the sketchily drawn E Street Band, is just weird.
Yes, that has to do with the focus, the period in which Springsteen sidestepped the barroom rock of his hit mid-to-late-70s albums to create Nebraska, his largely solo, home-recorded acoustic set of songs based on childhood memories or American nightmares. As the incredulous New York Columbia Records suit on hearing it asks: “Who’s it for?”
Many may ask the same of his often dour, low-voltage film, which has a default shot of White’s tilted head staring into space from across a diner table. The story is about how Springsteen’s mental health struggles – which he feared he had inherited from his father – mucked up any steady romantic relationship but informed the stark, and supposedly cathartic, record.
It’s based on the 2023 book Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska by Warren Zanes. Director and screenwriter Scott Cooper duly ticks off the influences of a rich variety of American gothic, whether it’s Terrence Malick’s film Badlands, the debut album by Suicide or the stories of Flannery O’Connor.
But clearly his script is also informed by Springsteen’s autobiography, especially when it comes to his relationship with his father. The scenes between White and Stephen Graham as Douglas Springsteen are among the most affecting and effective. Sure, he has plenty of heart-to-hearts with manager Jon Landau, the one-time Rolling Stone writer here depicted as a gnomish yes-man in an oddly mannered performance by Jeremy Strong (Succession).
And then there’s love interest “Faye Romano”, a composite character Jersey gal solo mum played by rising Australian actress Odessa Young who, having soaked up most of the film’s hairdressing budget, doesn’t get enough to do.
Who’s it for? Springsteen-ophiles, mainly. Especially ones with a penchant for Nebraska (reviewed below). There are worse movies about the making of great albums than this. And given it’s authorised by Springsteen, you have to admire his support. It’s certainly not a film showing them who’s Boss but something much more vulnerable.
Rating out of five: ★★★½
Past perfect
Previously unreleased tracks are included in box set that revisits Springsteen’s 1982 Nebraska album. Graham Reid reviews.
Physically and emotionally depleted after The River tours, which spanned 140 shows over 11 months up to September 1981, Bruce Springsteen retreated to rest, deal with creeping anxiety and consider the new batch of songs he’d been working on.
On The River double album, he’d experimented with “narrative songwriting”, where he created characters and inhabited them.
“It frees me to choose characters that are in some ways different from myself,” he said, “to sing in those voices and tell those stories along with my own.”
The new solo songs – influenced by Southern Gothic writers – dealt with outsiders and the emotionally adrift and were captured at home on a four-track tape machine, as Chris Knox and Doug Hood were doing the same with emerging Flying Nun bands.
He tried some songs with the E Street Band but eventually released the moody home recordings as the acclaimed Nebraska album. Ever since, fans have wondered about the “electric Nebraska” sessions with the band.
Now we know because the Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition box set includes eight songs from those sessions, nine solo acoustic out-takes (including Born in the USA and the regrettably pertinent Gun in Every Home), discarded songs and a recent live recording of him playing Nebraska, which is also a film.
It’s a lot of information about a lo-fi album notable for its economy, stripped-down delivery and thematic self-containment.
The Electric Nebraska album in fact finds some songs largely unchanged – although Johnny 99 rocks like Jerry Lee Lewis, Downbound Train is manic – and Born in the USA still needs shaping into the bleak anthem it became.
“Looking back, Electric Nebraska was pretty good,” he said recently. “At the time I thought [it] was a disaster … a fruitless effort in an attempt to make something better than was recorded, for better or worse, as it was and should have been.”
Springsteen loyalists will find this fascinating; others might agree with the Boss about the original Nebraska “as it was and should have been”. - Graham Reid
This set is available digitally, on CD and vinyl.
