In the 52 years since his first album was released, Bruce Springsteen has released 21 albums, sold more than 140 million records, won 20 Grammys, an Oscar and a Kennedy Center Honor and won raves playing thousands of concerts from clubs to stadiums around the world, all the while playing a brand of rock ’n’ roll forged in soul, garage rock and the British Invasion and devoted to chronicling the lives of the American working class from which he came.
And yet the first significant narrative movie about him, “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” is centered on much smaller moments, from the decision to change the lyrics of one song from third to first person to the difficulty of mastering a cassette tape to LP.
You could say that it’s crazy that Scott Cooper’s film focuses on things like those – but crazy is completely appropriate, because it was crazy in 1982 when Bruce Springsteen followed up his 1980 album “The River,” which gave him his first Top 10 single, with the stripped-down, low-fi acoustic album “Nebraska,” getting a few things off his chest before he was ready to embrace stardom with the breakthrough “Born in the U.S.A.” in 1984.
Springsteen went against the grain and against the commercial wisdom in making “Nebraska” and Cooper does the same thing in making a movie about that time in the artist’s life. “Deliver Me From Nowhere” is a bracing and moving antidote to beefed-up, heavily fictionalized rock biopics like the godawful “Bohemian Rhapsody.” In eschewing the kind of cradle-to-grave music-bio arc that has been all but impossible to pull off in the wake of the 2007 spoof “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” Cooper’s movie looks for little moments rather than grand statements, and trusts those to speak as loudly as they did on the “Nebraska” album itself.
The film, which had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival on Friday and will be released by 20th Century Studios in the fall, finds a portrait of the artist in a single stretch that led not to his biggest hit, but to his most uncharacteristic music that also proved to be some of his most indelible. Within that stretch, the film finds Springsteen’s antipathy about fame, his stubborn refusal to play by music-business rules except on his own terms and the way his stormy upbringing left him with psychological issues that he couldn’t get though simply by writing songs like “Independence Day” and “Adam Raised a Cain.”
Cooper previously showed a knack for capturing the feel of a life in music in his 2009 Oscar-winning drama “Crazy Heart,” and he listened to “Nebraska” constantly while making his dark 2013 drama “Out of the Furnace.” For “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” he adapted Warren Zanes’ 2023 nonfiction book about the making of and the cultural resonance of “Nebraska,” but his screenplay also draws liberally from Springsteen’s 2016 autobiography “Born to Run,” and in fact opens with a scene that comes straight from the book and its 2017 adaptation in the show “Springsteen on Broadway”: Bruce’s mother drives him through the New Jersey town of Freehold, parks outside a run-down bar and tells the boy to go in and get his father; young Bruce pushes aside the swinging doors, finds his dad on a stool at the end of the bar, tugs on his work pants and announces, “Mom says it’s time to go home.”
Like all of the movie’s flashbacks, this one is in shadowy black and white, which dissolves into dramatic stage lighting as a grown-up Springsteen sings “Born to Run” on the stage of Cincinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum to end his 1980-81 tour supporting “The River.” In a way, this is a moment of truth, the first time “The Bear” star Jeremy Allen White must convince us that he’s Springsteen – and while White is not a dead ringer, he’s clearly studied the moves and the poses and he nails the vocals surprisingly well. (A bit of real Springsteen is mixed into the vocals in a few moments, but for the most part the singing is White’s, recorded live on the set.) And playing a guy who could electrify 20,000 fans on a stage and then go home depressed, White’s hangdog charisma is just right.
Early in the film, Springsteen uneasily settles into his post-tour life and starts writing songs for the follow-up album that the record company fervently hopes will be his long-awaited commercial blockbuster. He picks up an acoustic guitar, then picks up a book of Flannery O’Connor short stories, then gets stir crazy and heads to his local club to sing some R&B songs with a local band, Cats on a Smooth Surface. The movie is very good at dropping key influences into the margins of the story: Springsteen will stumble on the Terrence Malick movie “Badlands” a little later, and his taste for the electronic art-noise band Suicide will show up, too.
For a film at least partly about music, “Deliver Me From Nowhere” makes effective use of silence, especially in the moments when Springsteen finds himself adrift rather than inspired. “It’s hard going home,” he says in a diner conversation with his manager and sounding board, Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), who nods.
“The quiet can get a little loud,” Landau says. “Give it some time. It’ll pass.”
But it passes in an unexpected way, as Springsteen’s songwriting detours from rock tunes into very understated, very dark songs, beginning with one written in the voice of Charlie Starkweather, a teenager who took his 14-year-old girlfriend on a killing spree across Nebraska and Wyoming in the late 1950s. “I’m not making a record,” Springsteen insists when he records the songs on a four-track cassette player. “I just want it to feel like I’m in the room by myself.”
Gradually, though, the stark recordings from that room starts to sound like the next record to an unsettled Springsteen, much to the dismay of CBS Records and most other people who’ve heard the songs like “Born in the U.S.A.,” “I’m on Fire” and “Glory Days” that have been recorded with the band. While Landau tells his client and friend, “You find something real, I’ll deal with the noise,” there’s lots of noise – including a sly moment when “Born to Run” engineer-turned-producer-turned-music-mogul Jimmy Iovine recreates the moment when he called Landau after learning of the plans to delay “Born in the U.S.A.” and release an acoustic album. “This is nuts, Jon!” says 72-year-old Iovine doing a voiceover as his 28-year-old self. “You know it. I know it.”
But if releasing “Nebraska” is nuts, it’s also necessary. The copious flashbacks in “Deliver Me From Nowhere” tell the story of Springsteen’s troubled relationship with a father whose mental illness went undiagnosed and untreated until late in his life. “Adolescence” creator and star Stephen Graham is heartbreaking as a man who can’t figure out how to communicate with his son besides brutalizing him in late-night boxing lessons. (Their later conflicts over the teenage Springsteen’s long hair and rock music, well documented in his onstage stories, aren’t mentioned.)
In a way, the film turns out to be less about “Nebraska” as an album than “Nebraska” as a way for Springsteen to heal, or at least to begin to deal with his episodes of depression. Even as the timeline gets seriously compressed and a fictional relationship with a young single mother (Odessa Young) occasionally feels awkward, the film doesn’t overplay its hand (the most overwrought line from the trailer is nowhere to be found) as it settles into a real wounded beauty.
For a Springsteen fan, there are plenty of satisfying tidbits along the way: a glimpse of Paul Schrader’s “Born in the U.S.A.” movie script, from which Springsteen borrowed a song title; the details of the room where “Nebraska” was recorded, from the TEAC four-track machine to the orange shag carpeting; the gorgeous Sam Cooke spiritual that Landau plays for Springsteen when his depression is at its worst.
The connection between Springsteen and Landau, a singular rock ’n’ roll artist/manager relationship that has lasted for half a century, is sketched with clarity and affection with the help of the two actors. Jeremy Strong may seemingly have the easier job since few audience members will know how the real person acts and sounds, but he doesn’t cut any corners; I can report that he nails Landau’s manner and his voice in moments like the one where Landau quotes Flannery O’Connor to an artist who’s struggling with the ghosts of his past: “Where you come from is gone. Where you thought you were going was never there.”
Back in 1988, I went on the road with Springsteen for a Rolling Stone cover story following the “Tunnel of Love” album. It was a few years after “Nebraska,” but he was still talking about the dichotomy that helped lead to that album.
“Even the type of connection you can make in your show, which is enormous, you can’t live there,” he said. “You have three hours onstage, and then you got the other 21. You may know exactly what you’re doing in those three hours, but you better figure out what you’re gonna do in them other 21, because you can’t book yourself around the clock.”
“Deliver Me From Nowhere” is all about those other 21 hours – and in another thing that seems a little crazy, that’s what makes it an unusually moving and unusually satisfying rock ’n’ roll movie.
A 20th Century Studios release, “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” opens in theaters on Oct. 24.