Springsteen's Legacy Deserves More Than 'Deliver Me From Nowhere'

Deliver Me From Nowhere is a handsomely produced, occasionally affective biopic which focuses almost all of its attention on the actors at its center rather than Bruce Springsteen, its ostensible subject. This one is for the fans only, and the obsessive fans. Occasional listeners of the Boss, or those who are expecting an introduction into one of America’s most renowned musicians, will likely need to peruse Springsteen’s Wiki in the car on the way home, or at least have a google to see what that Nebraska album was all about, so unforthcoming is Scott Cooper’s film.

It's All Acting, Not Enough Springsteen

Cooper is the director of the hard-nosed thrillers Out of the Furnace (2013) and Hostiles (2018), but he also made that treacly country music Oscar-winner Crazy Heart (2010), which is undoubtedly why he was phoned for this gig. That movie was a completely by-the-numbers addiction/redemption drama, but it featured a career-best performance from Jeff Bridges, who chewed up every bit of scenery on the way to a deserved Best Actor prize. Unfortunately, all the wrong lessons seem to have been transposed from Crazy Heart onto Deliver Me From Nowhere. 

Here, it’s the two Jeremys—Jeremy Allen White (as Springsteen) and Jeremy Strong (as his manager and producer, Jon Landau)—gnashing on the set, but they’re not nearly as watchable as Bridges. White is very good on The Bear, and Strong is good on Succession, but they’re both capital-A Actors with a range that spans several degrees of intensity. They are not performers who disappear into their roles, hampered by a degree of cultural baggage and the unfortunate fact that they don’t resemble the people whom they are playing. (We have another White and Strong team-up on the horizon in Aaron Sorkin's Social Network sequel.)

It Could Have Been About Any Musician

As a whole, Deliver Me From Nowhere is inseparable from the performances at its center. It’s an actor’s piece, and, appropriately, the associated press tour has been all about the acting. Come Academy Awards season, this will likely pop up in a few acting categories but be shut out elsewhere. The problem is this: Deliver Me From Nowhere never feels like a movie about Bruce Springsteen. It feels like a hastily assembled boardroom decision made to capitalize on the inexplicably hot music biopic genre, and the fact that it’s about Springsteen feels more like a financial move than a creative one. Too often, the movie devolves into overwrought melodrama with no direct purpose except that it distracts from the nitty-gritty obsessiveness of its best passages.

Cooper’s picture charts the production of Springsteen’s sixth album, Nebraska, with a citation-ready nerdiness that’s rare and admirable in the genre. Generally, this sort of contained timeline biopic is more effective than the sweeping entire-life biopics, which inevitably start to feel like a greatest hits checklist around the 75-minute mark, and Deliver Me From Nowhere contains several passages concentrated on the minutiae of album production, which rank highly in the pantheon of such sequences. But they’re buried within a too-obvious artist’s struggle narrative that could have been about any musician—Dizzy Gillespie, Kim Gordon, Kid Cudi, literally anyone—with the occasional Springsteen-ism dropped in. And despite the movie's obsessiveness, you never feel the artist's passion or drive. You certainly don't see the creative spark that produced 21 distinct studio albums. When Springsteen scrawls "WHY???" on a newspaper clipping of the Charles Starweather killings in an attempt to decipher the motive, it's such a fatuous sight you may be compelled to guffaw. (Starkweather was the original title of Nebraska, the album's eponymous opening track.)

Stephen Graham and Gaby Hoffmann Impress as Springsteen's Parents

Stephen Graham and Gaby Hoffman turn up as Springsteen’s parents, and they provide a surge of life despite mostly appearing in maudlin, flatly photographed black-and-white flashbacks. Graham and Hoffmann, two veteran actors with decades in the business, step in every once in a while to show the relatively green stars that one need not go big and dewey-eyed to make an emotional impact. Graham, fresh off of Adolescence, is both quietly terrifying and heartbreaking as Springsteen’s “troubled” father. Hoffmann, too, is magnetic as the comparatively more stable parent. A stronger movie might have foregrounded these relationships and shown us more of the fire in which Springsteen’s talent was forged.

For all of the hype surrounding the first movie directly about Springsteen’s life, Deliver Me From Nowhere doesn’t feel particularly interested in the man himself. Cooper drops us into major moments, like sweaty performances and the recording of “Born in the U.S.A.,” so fleetingly that they barely have time to land. There’s an interesting subversive tactic buried in there, one which might have worked in a better film but which doesn’t land here because everything around it also feels fleeting, like clipping through every five minutes of a TV show. Even those who know a great deal about Springsteen will leave the theater feeling further from him than ever.

Deliver Me From Nowhere is currently in cinemas nationwide.