Deliver Bruce Springsteen To Nebraska

Reverent doesn’t begin to describe the hallowed hagiography of Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, a hallelujah treatise on the Jersey messiah’s brooding LP meditation Nebraska. As a fan-service testament to Bruce Springsteen’s quiet integrity and fevered dark-night-of-the-soul anxiety over his emerging superstardom, the film is infallible. For those agnostics in the audience who feel indifferent to The Boss — among whom I count myself — the movie is fine, a solid though heavy-handed portrait of a deeply troubled rocker trying to find meaning and purpose within his newfound celebrity.

Scott Cooper wrote and directed this loving adaptation of Warren Zanes’ book Deliver Me from Nowhere, which examined how the arena-filling rock star followed up the hit-single success of breakthrough 1980 album The River with the stripped-down introspection of 1982’s Nebraska.

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Scott Cooper
Written by: Scott Cooper
Starring: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham, Odessa Young
Running time: 119 mins

What makes a success put out his least successful album? Fame. After wrapping up his last River tour date in Cincinnati (cue a live performance of “Born to Run,” with non-speaking extras cosplaying as the E Street Band), an exhausted Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White, radiating his working-class emo energy) heads back to Colts Neck, New Jersey for an autumnal self-reckoning.

Not even a brand-new jet-black Chevy Camaro Z28 with a state-of-the-art Pioneer sound system can ease his troubled mind — especially when the DJ plays recent chart-topper “Hungry Heart.” And a few heart-to-heart talks with manager/producer Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong, almost risibly intense) don’t soothe his restless soul. “The quiet can get loud,” he says. Bruce is adrift.

So he goes back to the basics, getting faithful recording engineer Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser) to bring over an innovative multi-track recorder that uses audiocassettes instead of reel-to-reel tape. This is the lowest of lo-fi equipment, just right for Springsteen’s urge to save expensive studio time and hammer out demos cheaply in his own bedroom.

Inspiration surrounds him: a copy of Flannery O’Connor’s collected works on his coffee table, not to mention a TV airing of Badlands, Terence Malick’s unnerving and grimly beautiful take on Charles Starkweather’s 1958 murder spree in Nebraska and Wyoming. We see Springsteen look though his local library’s micro-fiche newspaper clippings of the nihilistic teenager’s true-life crimes. We see Springsteen scribble down the lyrics to various songs. And, at one point, he crosses out “he” and puts “I.” Then he crosses out “him” and puts, in all caps, “ME.”

The film’s leitmotif: Springsteen’s haunted childhood memories of his abusive alcoholic dad (Stephen Graham fresh from Adolescence), a good man with bad flaws who leaves psychic scars, as we see in black-and-white flashbacks to a grade-school Bruce looking with anguished eyes suffering at the hands of his drunkard father.

“I dug deep, but I think they have potential,” Springsteen writes Landau in a letter accompanying the initial demo recordings. “It’s like he’s channeling something deep — and, quite frankly, dark,” says Landau to his dutifully inquisitive wife Barbara (Grace Gummer, irrelevant and wasted). Springsteen doubles down on the demo aesthetic, adding an echo machine even after Mike tells him the tape speeds are off. “It’s definitely not ‘Hungry Heart,’” cracks Mike.

Landau, doing his best to guide Springsteen back to the mainstream, hands him a film script that Paul Schrader wrote, with the filmmaker’s intent to direct the rocker in his movie debut alongside Oscar-winner Robert De Niro. The name on the screenplay? Born in the U.S.A. Months later, Landau asks if Springsteen has read it yet. “No,” he replied. “But it has a good title.”

Soon enough, we see Springsteen record a blistering take of “Born in the U.S.A.” at the Hit Factory. Everyone gets goosebumps. He wrote it for Nebraska but it’s clearly destined for world-shaking adoration. And once that’s in the can, suddenly there’s no tension left in the movie. What’s at stake for Springsteen, if he’s just recorded the biggest song of his life?

Nebraska is fundamentally the film’s organizing principle, but we rarely hear more than a few snippets from a smattering of the album’s ten tracks. Why? Because it was never a hit record. Because the songs are gloomy and quiet and weird. Because they’re not “Born to Run” or “Born in the U.S.A.” Because Scott Cooper is making a crowd-pleasing movie about an introspective album and needs crowd-pleasing music to sell it. Which makes Deliver Me from Nowhere hollow, a story about integrity that feels oddly compromised by its lack of faith in the very material that that integrity produced.

“No single, no tour, no press. No joke,” says Landau to record exec Al Teller (David Krumholtz) once Columbia has committed to releasing Nebraska, in a scene so mock-confrontational that it’s almost charming. Of course Columbia is going to release Nebraska — what do they care? The bean-counters are sitting on a solid-gold studio recording of “Born in the U.S.A.” that will cement Springsteen’s status in the rock firmament and mint money for decades. They’re patient. They can wait. Let Springsteen do his vanity project.

As a compassionate look at a sensitive artist trying to preserve his own creativity in the face of commercial demands, and as a considered study of the crippling power of anxiety and depression, Deliver Me from Nowhere is heart-burstingly well-intentioned. But as a film, Cooper’s salute to Springsteen falls prey to biopic conventions and market-driven demands for an accessible hero’s journey with a happy ending: All the lessons that Nebraska itself famously subverts.