The central question that lightly keeps Scott Cooper’s mostly comatose Bruce Springsteen biopic alive is how an artist creates work from pain. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is about the construction of a single album, Nebraska, and how the writing of its ten songs was borne from a conglomeration of Springsteen’s depression as much as from the avoidance of the same. But, if Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) is a poet laureate of the American working class, and Cooper’s portrait of him is meant to evoke the singular artistry of such a trailblazer, then the film is a total failure. Packed with leaden tropes and a frustrating devotion to literalism, Deliver Me From Nowhere removes all the complexity and nuance from one of Springsteen’s most compelling works.
Cooper’s script is adapted from Warren Zanes’ biography of the same name, and the subject is fascinating, but it is pretty clear that Cooper hasn’t done much to the book to make it cinematic. Springsteen has just come off the hugely successful tour for his album The River, and Columbia Records executive Al Teller (David Krumholtz) is thirsty for another money-making banger. But Springsteen was an anguished man in his early 30s whose skyrocketing to fame forced the artist to skip over the requisite healing of childhood trauma. So Springsteen, instead, made a soulful folk album recorded in his Colt’s Neck, New Jersey home with an Echoplex.
The bold departure from rock and roll was a risky move away from sure-fire success, but with the protection of good friend and manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), Springsteen holds fast to his artistic guns, and the rest is history. Nebraska climbed to third on the charts despite his insistence that the album not get press, a tour, nor even his face on the cover.
Scott Cooper’s Biopic Is A Painfully Literal Portrait Of A Complex Piece Of Art
As Springsteen, White is unsurprisingly effective. His portrayal of The Boss is slouched and perpetually turned away, as if shielding himself from being discovered. Even in intimate conversations with Jon or single mother paramour Faye (Odessa Young), White’s Springsteen points his body at angles, all shoulders and contorted head. A man whose penchant for emotional avoidance has become a continued physical practice. It’s a startling performance wanting for a stronger film.
White is especially effective at portraying Springsteen’s famed on-stage persona, playing him like a man possessed. He seems to burst out of his skin at any given moment, his H๏τ, red skin inflamed with the inspiration of the rock gods. When we meet Springsteen, he is sitting backstage with a white towel over his neck, dripping so much sweat onto the floor that he has created a puddle. A boxer on the musical stage, his artistry is an overwhelming sucker punch to both his audience and to himself. But while White’s performance is complex, the film is nothing at all, really.
To give you an example of the kind of hare-brained exposition at play here, there is a flashback of Springsteen with his abusive father, Douglas (Stephen Graham), as they approach a mansion on a hill. Cooper and editor Pamela Martin immediately cut to Springsteen writing the song, “Mansion on a Hill.” Oh, look, here’s Springsteen having a wonderful day in Atlantic City with Faye and her daughter, Haley (Vienna Barrus); now he’s writing “Atlantic City” on a notepad as a possible song for the album. Later, when Springsteen and the E Street Band are recording “Born in the U.S.A.,” which would get shelved momentarily, Cooper cannot help but show the sea of engineers watching, nodding, and ruefully smiling. Boy howdy, do they have a hit!
The film’s more cheeseball choices are deeply unfortunate, especially as the film is intended as a tribute to a piece of art that defies easy explanation. There are moments when Cooper seems to understand this (hell, Springsteen says that he couldn’t explain the album at the end of the film), and the film is sH๏τ beautifully with flashes of artistic integrity. A repeated flashback to Springsteen with his father at the movies watching The Night of the Hunter, or a late-night catch of Terence Malick’s Badlands are little indicators of the sometimes cosmic ways art begets more art. But then it kneecaps itself again and again with hoary clichés. The entire childhood section is filmed in black and white, a silly decision that undermines the film’s very conception of memory as a living, breathing organism.
The film’s best attribute is the romance between Bruce and Faye. White and Young’s chemistry is palpable, and Cooper solidly helps us understand why an artist on the verge of overwhelming fame might be interested in a working-class single mother, whose planted smile belies the pain of someone abandoned and bereft. There’s a nuance here that the rest of the film sorely lacks and needs. But it is also from a different film. Cooper seems either unaware of his own intentions or else too seduced by the temptations of the biopic genre’s worst tendencies. The last 30 minutes are especially tedious, ending with what can only be described as a saccharine advertisement for the benefits of talk therapy.
Springsteen deserves an actual cinematic ode to the boldest album of his early career, one that emphasizes how Nebraska pulls from such a vast array of influences, both personal and public, to create something so uniquely American. Instead, we have this, which mostly amounts to a series of diner scenes where a parade of prop-like characters softly encourage Bruce to take care of himself. Nearly every scene that Strong is in involves the Succession actor taking exposition to new heights. It is entirely possible that, rather than create interest in Springsteen’s achievement, Cooper’s film has kicked it to the curb.
