REVIEW. SPRINGSTEEN / DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE: A Tale of Two Jeremy's in the Land of Clichés and Memes.

Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Scott Cooper's Springsteen / Deliver Me From Nowhere.

NOTE: I have been a huge fan of Bruce Springsteen for fifty years now, ever since he graced the covers of both Time and Newsweek in the same week: October 27, 1975. His music has underscored - and sometimes, paralleled - key moments in my own life, songs that continue to evoke memories joyful and sad, pensive and painful, triumphant and mournful. Being a fan is both a blessing and curse writing this review, and I've tried to focus on Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere's merit as a movie and not as a commentary on Springsteen or his music.

*******

One of the principle foundations of good movie-making is this adage: "show, don't tell." Since movies are, arguably, the grandest of visual media, it makes sense that too much dialogue, too many explanations, take away from the audience's audio-optic experience. That's why writing an effective screenplay is so important in cinema, as it is different from writing novels or short stories. I've often asserted that really good novels rarely make great movies, using F. Scott Fitzgerald as a prime example. Fitzgerald could take pages to describe a beautiful sunset, which, in cinemaspeak, might be relegated to one single shot. How, then, does that visual express all the nuances, all the emotions of the novel's text?

In the silent movie era, where the totality of the story - the narrative, the relationships, the conflicts and climax - all relied on visuals to convey effectively, not only the movie's plot, but its emotional core. Charlie Chaplin was a master evoking the human element that underscored all his moves, from City Lights to Modern Times. Since talkies first arrived almost a century ago, filmmakers have been tasked with balancing sight and sound, in making movies that are visually stunning and aurally satisfying.

That's the essential problem in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, writer-director Scott Cooper's long-awaited movie version of Warren Zanes's fine history of the same name. Zane is a musician and scholar, and former guitarist for The Del Fuegos. Zanes's book is subtitled "The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska," the almost primitive (in terms of its recording techniques) collection of songs the New Jersey rock star wrote during a privotal, and intensely troubling, moment in his life and career.

Nebraska was released in September 1982, just after Springsteen's successful trifecta of albums (and their subsequent tours) - Born to Run (1975), Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), The River (1980), and before 1984's Born in the USA transported Springsteen from rock star to music icon. After The River tour ended in 1981, Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) returned to his native New Jersey, rented a modest home in Colts Neck and holed up there alone, trying to make sense of his career journey amidst determining his next move.

For Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), Springsteen's longtime manager/champion, who famously said, "I've seen rock and roll's future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen," the next step was clear: another big rock and roll album that would ride The Boss's crest of fame that began with Born to Run. For Springsteen, though, the path wasn't so clear: his return to New Jersey triggered troubling memories of his childhood, specifically, of his abusive, alcoholic father (Stephen Graham) Douglas "Dutch" Springsteen. The elder Springsteen, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, is perceived by young Bruce as emotionally distant and detached, and the memories of their frequent and tense encounter linger in the adult Bruce mind.

Left alone to celebrate the success of his recent tour, Springsteen instead became almost pathologically introspective, unable to shake the personal demons and unresolved mental torment that seemed to define his formative years. This kind of reaction - an artist's letdown after an exhilerating concert tour - in itself is fairly common, but Springsteen's dissent into depression is especially unusual and, ultimately, disturbing.

Cooper is no stranger to dark themes, having written screenplays for movies like Crazy Heart (2009) and Out of the Furnace (2013). Unfortunatey, his screenplay here often resorts to simplisitic pop psychology phrases to explain Springsteen's sense of alienation, his deepening depression, his sense of loss even in the face of enormous artistic and commercial success. In one scene, Landau confides in his wife Barbara (Grace Gummer) that Springsteen is struggling with songs for the next album, and that the early demos he's listened to are disturbing, their conversation goes something like this:

Jon Landau: “It's like he's channeling something deeply personal and dark."

Barbara Landau: "It sounds like he's pushing boundaries."

Okay, maybe. But that kind of dialogue doesn't enhance or enlighten the issue: we are watching an artist potentially self-destruct and the people closest to him seem unable to help him in a meaningful way. Platitudes don't seem like the answer, but the script is punctuated with lots of clichés designed to ensure we get the desired takeway: that, despite his struggles with depression, Springsteen has remained a man of hope (at least, that's what we're told at the end of film).

Despite the simplification of Springsteen's emotional breakdown, there is a lot to cheer about in Cooper's film. Like last year's A Complete Unknown, which focused on a pivotal juncture in Bob Dylan's early career (his infamous use of electric instruments at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965), Deliver Me From Nowhere wisely follows suit and examines a critical turning point in Springsteen's emotional and professional career, one that almost seemed like the reverse of Dylan's. Instead of following up his early rock and roll successes with another driving rock album, Springsteen was driven to write something smaller and quieter: an all-accoustic compilation of songs that were, in part, inspired by a chance viewing of Terrence Malick's 1973 neo-noir crime thriller Badlands on TV, the writings of Flannery O'Connor, and Springsteen's recurring flashbacks to his childhood in Freehold.

Though he simultaneously drafted songs that would eventually comprise his subsequent, now iconic album Born in the USA, Springsteen could not seem to let go of the stories he was creating about working class men, some like his father, others criminals and outlaws (like Charles Starkweather, on which Badlands was based), searching for a redemption, a personal liberation that never comes. It's as though the "death trap, suicide rap," that he references in 1975's "Born to Run," the one waiting for those who can't escape their ordinary lives, has taken root inside his own heart and soul, and he can't shake it.

Cooper juxtaposes Springsteen's adult angst and childhood pain with contrasting color (the present) and black and white (his memories) to deconstruct the cause of his depression. The problem is that, in trying to illustrate the connection between the trauma young (Bruce Matthew Anthony Pellicano) experienced at the hand of his emotionally detached father, Cooper winds up with an reductionist view of depression in general, and Springsteen's situation, in particular.

We witness many flashbacks of Springsteen in numerous terrifying encounters with his father. One that recurs is a trip to the movies to see 1955's The Night of the Hunter, a noir horror thriller starring Robert Mitchum (the one where he famously has "Love" and "Hate" tatooed on his fingers) and Shelley Winters. The only known film credited to director Charles Laughton, who called the novel on which it is based a "nightmarish Mother Goose story," Night's frightening visual images clearly left a mark on eight-year-old Bruce, who returns to that moment as he writes the increasing dark, desperate lyrics that would frame Nebraska.

We later see the adult Bruce attending a retrospective of the film, imaging that time with his father. At times this association with past and present seems too easy, a kind of glib reconcilliation with one's past as explanation for present circumstances. Springsteen has written about the ongoing challenge of moving beyond where you came from. In 2007's "The Long Walk Home," he wrote:

My father said, "Son, we're lucky in this town.

It's a beautiful place to be born.

It just wraps its arms around you.

Nobody crowds you and nobody goes it alone.

Your flag flyin' over the courthouse

Means certain things are set in stone.

Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't."

How does one reconcile the values and mores learned as a child with a very different culture as an adult? How does an artist channel inner turmoil into something beautiful?

As the child of working class parents, I immediately related to the idea of Springsteen grappling with the reality of how life choices can move you away from the place you started. In my case, it was going to college, then graduate school, and finding myself inhabiting a social and cultural milieu (academia) that was far from the industrial Cleveland-area neighborhood I grew up in. Though I never really felt like I fit into my blue collar surroundings as a child, I was still, at times, overwhelmed by the idea of leaving that part of me behind.

For me, the scene in which a young Bruce is sent into a local bar to tell his father it's time to come home hit hard. Though I never did that with my father who came home directly from the General Motors plant every day like clockwork greeting me with a warm hug, I did once go into the 2000 Bar in Lorain to retrieve my uncle who had stayed long after his 11-7 night shift at US Steel. Watching the camera follow Bruce past the row of men hunched over on high top stools until he tentatively taps his dad on the back, brought back my own recollection of what it often meant to grow up in a social class where life was hard, work hours were long, and the opportunity for relaxation and fun a distant hope reserved only for those with money.

Deliver Me From Nowhere could have really run with this internal conflict, layering it with more of the things that shaped Springsteen's childhood: his relationship with his mother and his siblings, the impact of the Catholic church in which he was raised, all of which played a prominent role in his early life. All of these have been well-documented in a variety of books and articles, including Springsteen's 2016 autobiography, Born to Run, and could have been used to great(er) effect in the movie.

Perhaps, Cooper decided some of this information would have been too bleak, or the story too complex, for the average fan/moviegoer, but by choosing an especially dark period in Springsteen's life, Cooper could/should have pushed deeper into the roots of his depression. Instead, we get lots of platitues, a fictitious single-mother girlfriend named Faye (Odessa Young), and virtually no meaningful presence of the E Street Band. Granted, Springsteen was mostly alone during this period that covers the creation of what would become Nebraska (and he ultimately rejected the E Street's recording the album's final tracks), but there seemed to be important pieces missing in the development of this time in his life. What we're left with as a cause of this desolute time of soul searching is incomplete, and the resolution we're given between Springsteen and his father is ultimately unsatisfying. Though what happens is, apparently true, whether it happened during the time the film takes place is uncertain, leaving the encounter as a potentially inauthentic way of bringing closure to Springsteen's personal struggles.

In the end, the real story here, the foundational relationship that drives Deliver Me From Nowhere, is the brotherhood between Springsteen and Landau. The two Jeremy's here, White and Strong, are a joy to behold as they banter and joke, tussle and spar, about the music, Bruce's career, and Landau's undying belief in the brilliance of his client/friend. When, at the end of recording Nebraska exactly the way Springsteen wanted, maintaining the lonely, isolated sound of the bedroom in which the songs were recorded, Jon admits that Bruce's deepening depression is beyond his scope of support. It is a quiet and heartfelt moment, made genuine by the skill of both actors. Landau continues to impress with a performance equal to, if not better than, his Oscar-nominated turn as Roy Cohn in last year's The Apprentice.

As for White, he neither looks, moves or sounds much like Bruce Springsteen. To his credit, he does not attempt an inpersonation, choosing to interpret Springsteen as an artist in crisis. White did learn to sing and play the guitar for this role. Fortunately, the Nebraska melodies do not require intricate musical expertise or nuance, and White has learned Springsteen's vocal cadences well enough to capture certain words and phrases with a keen degree of authenticity.

Some of my blog readers know of my skepticism about actors playing rock stars when plenty of recordings, concert footage and music videos exist to document their genius. Timothée Chalamet changed my perception more than a bit with his impressive immersion in Bob Dylan's psyche in last year's A Complete Unknown, and Jeremy Allen White continues my optimism about how the idea of a rock biopic has improved, mostly by narrowing the scope of the artist's career to a pivotal moment or period in the artist's life, rather than attempting a sweeping life story.

Deliver Me From Nowhere, which takes place between roughty September 1981 and June 1984, has almost no women of note, save Springsteen's mother Adele (Gabby Hoffmann) and the fictitious Faye. I couldn't help but wonder if Faye's presence, even as a sort of composite of the women Springsteen might have been involved with during this time, was the most effective way to express this aspect of his emotional detachment. So much of the movie is intended to connect his traumatic childhood with his emotional isolation as an adult as it relates to making of Nebraska, including the four-track recorder Springsteen used to record the songs, that the brief sequences with Faye and her daughter almost distracted from the movie's core.

Overall, as the self-admitted Springsteen fan I have been low these past five decades (there are more rabid fans than I), I left the theater feeling something was missing, that I wanted to see Cooper & Co. really dig into the despair Springsteen experienced more fully than they do here. Springsteen fans will undoubtedly debate the merits of this effort, with everything from minute details to broader themes about the "other" side of rock stardom. The movie left me with lots to think about, and I'm sure I will find time to see it again.

Truth be told, Nebraska has never been my favorite Springsteen album. Maybe it's because it reminds me of relationships past, one in particular, in which my then partner used to play Nebraska, along with David Ackles's American Gothic and Bob Dylan's version of "All Along the Watchtower, in succession at three in the morning whenever he was wallowing in personal regrets. Though I understand the brilliance of Springsteen's artistry, the gutsiness of Nebraska's stark and minimalist recording, the depth of its lyrics, and the kind of "anti-rock star" message Springsteen seemed to be sending at the time, I can't say it's my Bruce go-to playlist.

Hearing those haunting songs again thus brought back memories of an unhappy time in my life, as revisiting it isn't something I try to do often. What struck me more today was the profound connection I felt with Springsteen as the child of working class parents who, by interest and desire (and a father who told me to "get out of Lorain and see the world"), moved to a very different social and cultural milieu, and who still feels pulled to the memories of the family I grew up in.

As Jon Landau reminds Bruce Springsteen in the move (quoting Flannery O'Connor from her novel, Wise Blood): "Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it". 

Words to live by. I must remember that.

For those non-Springsteen fans reading this review, the title of Zanes's book (which I highly recomment)/Cooper's movie comes from the final line in "State Trooper," the sixth song on Nebraska's playlist, spoken by a driver pulled over in a tense, psychologically fragile state, who is asking the law enforcement officer to let him go: "Hey, somebody out there – Listen to my last prayer / 'Hi ho, Silver, oh!' / Deliver me from nowhere." Zanes sees this line as a kind of metaphor for his very intimate, carefully crafted narrative about Springsteen's personal struggles during what would become a kind of turning point in his musical career, as though he possessed an innate sense that the much anticipated Born in the USA album would eventually secure his spot as one of rock's premiere superstars, a status he was torn to accept.

We never quite see Springsteen's vision/fear that another big album will solidify his status as a global icon. And what we have here sometimes feels like Scott Cooper was torn between really exploring Springsteen's psychological struggle and maintaining The Boss's persona as a powerful, strong rock and roll superstar.

In searching for easier, tidier solutions to Springsteen's emotional struggles, Cooper's story ultimately seems to ride in on the steel horse from another New Jersey rock star: Bon Jovi's hit, "Wanted: Dead or Alive," and not in the high-performance Mustang Cobra jet Springsteen references in "Open All Ngiht" from the Nebraska album, or the Camaro Z28 he purchases in the film. Watching the movie is thus almost like getting on a bus with an overly talkative tour guide when what you really want to do is have a seat on the California Zephyr and just let the whole beauty of the experience wash over you.

One final thought that keeps nagging at me: the movie's title.

Do we really need "Springsteen" as a kind of qualifier for the rest of the title? We didn't need "Elton John: Rocketman" or "Bob Dylan: A Complete" to flag what the movie is about. Did marketers really feel it necessary to include Springsteen's name as the first word of the title? Would audiences have turned away without it or, worse yet, not known the film was about Bruuuce? Again, TMI when a little less explanation and a bit more mystery might have enhanced the meaning of the title, just like fewer clichés and memes might have revealed more of the exquisite pain that is part of who Springsteen is.

I dunno. Maybe my expectations were too high. Perhaps, I wanted more from a movie about one of my heroes, no matter how dark, troubled and flawed that idol might be. Guess I'm just a working class girl at heart, still (forever?) living in a land of hopes and dreams.

*******

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is rated PG-13 and currently playing in wide theatrical release. It will likely not be released to streaming platforms until early in 2026.