I’ve often been curious why Bruce Springsteen never chose to act in a movie. Even Bob Dylan, perhaps the least emotive folk-rock stage performer of all time, showed up in a couple of films. Springsteen, by contrast, is nothing if not stirring onstage. His leather-jacketed prole persona carries Brando and Pacino vibes.
Instead, it’s been left to Jeremy Allen White to portray the Boss in “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” written and directed by Scott Cooper. Comparisons to “A Complete Unknown,” the Bob Dylan biopic from last year starring Timothée Chalamet, are inevitable – if only because both films feature a facsimile of the real deal. But “A Complete Unknown” positioned Dylan at the center of a story about a cultural shift in the folk-rock cosmos. For all its faults, the film’s thematic vista was wide.
“Deliver Me From Nowhere,” drawn from Warren Zanes’ eponymous 2023 Springsteen biography, is far less ambitious. It’s about how Springsteen, coming off the smash success of his 1980 album, “The River,” shunned his burgeoning stardom. Instead of capitalizing on the momentum from hits like “Born To Run,” he did a deep dive inward and sequestered himself inside a rented house near his old boyhood neighborhood in New Jersey. There, he recorded what became his next album, “Nebraska,” in his bedroom on a four-track tape recorder.
Why We Wrote This
The new movie “Springsteen,” drawn from a biography, portrays a more subdued Bruce than the one whose rousing concert images pepper the internet. The film mines the origins of the “Nebraska” album looking for what drives a living legend.
The film makes abundantly clear that “Nebraska” was Springsteen’s deeply personal foray into themes of abandonment and loss. The album, some of which is heard in snatches on the soundtrack, has a mellifluous monotony, as if Springsteen was mesmerized by his own loneliness. When the record label execs, hoping for another hit album, lean on Springsteen’s manager and close friend Jon Landau (a reined-in Jeremy Strong) to ditch the tracks, Team Springsteen, after some grousing, stands united. This may be the only movie ever made where the central conflict revolves around how to faithfully transfer an original cassette tape demo to vinyl.
Cooper wrote and directed a fine film in 2009 about a balladeer, “Crazy Heart,” starring an Oscar-winning Jeff Bridges. He understands Springsteen’s star-making milieu. But he has chosen to offer up a host of Psych 101 snippets to signal why the Springsteen of this movie is so morose. He lards his film with black-and-white flashbacks of young Bruce protecting his mother (Gaby Hoffmann) while warding off the violent bullying of his father (Stephen Graham).
Clips are repeatedly inserted from Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” which Springsteen watched frequently on TV. That film’s violent anomie, dealing with the infamous 1958 killing spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate, influenced the conception of “Nebraska.” We’re also shown clips from the lyrical horror classic “Night of the Hunter” (1955) featuring Robert Mitchum as a preacher who terrorizes his newfound brood. To reinforce the obvious, we see clips of young Bruce watching the film with his dad.
Cooper also makes the dubious decision to play up the correspondence between Springsteen’s boyhood memories and his songs. A flashback to the boy being driven by his father to gaze upon a mansion on a hill becomes the basis for one of the cuts in “Nebraska” – “Mansion on the Hill.” And so on.
Springsteen’s girlfriend in the film, Faye Romano (a touching Odessa Young), is intended as a composite of all the women he couldn’t face up to during that fraught time in his life. A working-class single mom who isn’t cowed by his stardom, she demands more from him than this nowhere man is capable of giving.
The Springsteen of this movie is as closed off in private as he is gangbusters while performing. White does a creditable job of sounding and swiveling like Bruce in the film’s few concert scenes, but offstage he is a brooding lump. It is by no means unprecedented that the life of a great performer can be so bifurcated. But to make us begin to understand the anguish on display here, the movie needed more emotional layers and fewer obvious signposts. Didn’t, for example, Springsteen privately enjoy even just a little bit of his power to whip audiences into a frenzy? The movie is about a living legend whose unofficial anthem is “Born to Run,” but we never really see what he’s running from. Or to.
Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” is rated PG-13 for thematic material, some sexuality, strong language, and smoking.
