In what amounts to one of my most embarrassing admissions, I don’t know a thing about Bruce Springsteen. Sort of, anyway. I’m loosely familiar with a couple of hits, and I know the Conan O’Brien bandleader was the drummer, and Silvio from The Sopranos was the guitarist. And that nifty video with Courtney Cox, I know about that one too. But otherwise, he’s probably one of my biggest musical blind spots. Some of that is perhaps geographical; the deep south is hardly a hotbed of fandom for “The Boss,” and some of it is generational. Once you tick past Gen X, the last bastion of a specific kind of blue-collar rock fandom, Springsteen played less and less in the background of our youths. Yet I know British Invasion and Punk deep cuts from front to back. We pick and choose the soundtrack of our lives.
This puts me in an odd position, sitting to watch a film about the creation of Asbury Park’s most famous export’s stripped-down Nebraska album. An album I’ve never heard. But perhaps that’s also a strength, going in with the proverbial blank slate. Music biopics, for all their flaws, can be propped up (or torn down) by the strong feelings we hold about their subject matter. No such issue here. Art for art’s sake, and thus it can be judged on its own merits.
Deliver Me from Nowhere, which I will now call Springsteen because the full title evokes the feeling of marbles in my mouth, is straightforwardly the apex of director Scott Cooper‘s blue-collar filmmaking. Never a filmmaker I’ve particularly admired, yet still, his approach to the industrialized and rural corners of our country has a specific tactile grit that flies off the screen. It’s difficult to envision a stronger marriage of filmmaker and subject matter, at least in this beleaguered genre. And as a story about an artist inspired by another’s art, it works, to a degree. In this case, Bruce (Jeremy Allen White), waylaid by chronic depression though unaware of it by name, is sitting in a rental house out in the middle of nowhere when he happens to catch Terrence Malick’s Badlands on television. This sends him down a rabbit hole about the real-life inspiration for the film (serial murderer Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Anne Fugate), which then transforms into the raw material for the aforementioned Nebraska.
To be sure, the making of this four-track, bedroom-produced acoustic record is the most arresting part of Springsteen. White delivers a rather impressive Springsteen impression/performance that particularly comes alive when he’s playing on stage or strumming the guitar all by his lonesome. It’s a boring cliché, but there is a point where one stops seeing White and just starts seeing “Bruce” instead. The push and pull between Bruce and the record company, and his own struggles in the studio to replicate the sound he’s hearing in his head, is fascinating to watch. That much of this is amply supported by Jeremy Strong as Bruce’s longtime manager/record producer Jon Landau proves essential. While Strong’s famous intensity does occasionally overwhelm (he often gives 11 when 10 will do), there’s a lovely sense of friendship made palpable on screen between artist and manager. A rarity, given how a musician’s representation is usually presented. Jon acting as Bruce’s sounding board, source of support, and fiercest advocate becomes increasingly refreshing the more time we spend with him. At the same time, we also see what an abject nightmare the rising star is becoming as he wrestles with his mental health and perfectionism in the studio. It’s here where Springsteen shines brightest, even if it occasionally veers into Walk Hard territory, such as when Bruce flashes back to his father taking him to see a rural mansion and then immediately begins writing the song “My Father’s House.”
Speaking of his dad (played here by Stephen Graham), the strand that Springsteen presents on that front proves a little more mixed. As Douglas battles his way through his daily blue streak, the flashbacks begin to pummel us. Bruce had a tough childhood under a father who was constantly kissing the better end of a beer bottle, and from there, we as viewers of this archetypal story feel like we know where this sad tale is likely headed. What Cooper and company do instead is the proverbial zig when it seems they’re going to zag. You see, Douglas Springsteen suffers from the exact same kind of chronic depression that Bruce is wrapped up in, and the script spends significant time reckoning with the idea of inherited behavioral health struggles. It doesn’t quite thread the needle well enough on that front. There’s very little time where Douglas isn’t intoxicated, somewhat burying the lede, but thematically it’s Springsteen‘s richest text and the most welcome new wrinkle to the formula.
Not so anything related to Odessa Young‘s Faye, a fictionalized stand-in presumably for a number of women that Bruce likely left in his wake during his glory days. A single mother that Bruce gets introduced to after a pick-up gig in his hometown, they immediately begin seeing one another and things get pretty heavy. Too heavy for old Bruce though, and it goes exactly where all of the early relationships in these films usually end up. It’s clear that Cooper intended for this to be a signifier of Bruce’s inability to carry on a normal relationship due to the impact of everything above: music and art above all else. But so much of what it says is already present in his day-to-day working relationship with his collaborators that this addition to the story feels perfunctory, almost like a studio note indicating discomfort with the idea of a purely slice-of-life, act-of-artistic-creation story.
Springsteen is an imperfect film, one that arguably doesn’t add up to much at all. Cooper can’t quite thread together his inherited trauma storyline with the creative process material in a way that feels cohesive, and the formulaic romantic subplot actively works against what’s interesting elsewhere. But maybe as an entry point for someone like me, someone who doesn’t have one for arguably the biggest rock star of his era, it has value. The film exists in that strange space where its failures are almost more interesting than its successes, where you can see what it’s reaching for even as it comes up short. White’s committed performance and the film’s best moments, those intimate glimpses of artistic creation, elevate it above the overwhelming glut of paint-by-numbers biopics, even if it never quite escapes their gravitational pull. Maybe I’ll finally listen to Nebraska, now.