Big-screen Springsteen: ‘Deliver Me From Nowhere’ zeroes in on dark chapter of The Boss’ life (REVIEW)

Jeremy Allen White, left, and Jeremy Strong play Bruce Springsteen and Jon Landau in “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.”

NEW YORK — In one of Bruce Springsteen’s old, favorite fantasies, his life was a Hollywood fiction, and he was the star.

“That movie would be the one where I play an itinerant musician,” he revealed in his 2016 memoir “Born to Run.” “Unlucky in love but fabulously and unrewardingly talented, a charismatic man whose happy-go-lucky exterior covers a bruised but noble soul.”

In that fond daydream, “I transform the life of everyone I meet to such a degree that they welcome me into their homes, feed me, lay upon my brow laurels, give me their girlfriends and will ‘always remember’ me,” he writes. But in the end, of course, the road calls him back.

“I lived that masterpiece for a long time,” he admits.

“Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” is not that film.

Jeremy Allen White and Odessa Young in “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.”

Instead, the movie — the subject of a gala presentation in Manhattan on Sept. 28, as part of the 63d annual New York Film Festival — is a far rougher, less comforting story. There are moments of Hollywood gloss, to be sure. But it’s really the tale, not of a rock star, but an artist. And ultimately, the story of a human being like many others — scarred by a poor and sometimes brutal childhood, struggling with crippling bouts of depression.

At first the night had any big film festival’s shine of celebrity and glamour. Hopeful autograph hounds clustered outside Alice Tully Hall, holding up stills and album covers. Inside, ticket holders and VIP guests filled the lobby. Jeremy Strong, who plays Springsteen manager Jon Landau, chatted with E Street drummer Max Weinberg. Film fans and music insiders sipped wine.

Once you entered the theater, though, and the movie began, much of that cozy privilege fell away.

Based on the 2023 book “Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska” by Warren Zanes — an NYU professor but, perhaps more pertinently, the guitarist for the Del Fuegos — the film, which opens on Oct. 24 (watch trailer below), zeroes in on a crucial point in Springsteen’s life. It is the early ’80s, and the double album The River had been an enormous hit. “Hungry Heart” had been a Top 10 single. He has just finished a massive tour. And everyone at Columbia Records has one, important question.

Now what?

Springsteen isn’t sure.

Jeremy Allen White in “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.”

In fact, at the time Springsteen was increasingly unsure about a lot of things — the weight of the past, the lessons of his childhood, his relationships with women, the future of his art. And so he ran away, to a rented house in Colts Neck. He got some cheap recording equipment. And, picking up an acoustic guitar, he began to sing — timeless songs that felt more remembered than written, dirges that sounded like something sung by a ghost.

It was the beginning of what would become Nebraska — but not before a lot of angst, argument and what seemed close to a full-on nervous breakdown.

“Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” gets a lot of that right, due almost completely to its fine cast. True, Jeremy Allen White doesn’t look an awful lot like Springsteen — he doesn’t have the chin, or the grin — but he’s a master of bad, brooding moods. He is also a surprisingly good mimic (he provides the vast majority of the vocals here, and if you can immediately tell which are his and which are Springsteen’s, you have a better ear than I.)

Jeremy Strong provides a fine counterbalance as Springsteen’s endlessly patient and protective manager and confidante, Jon Landau (“I think we would all be better off if we had a Jon Landau in our lives,” director Scott Cooper said after the screening). The formidable Stephen Graham, from “Adolescence,” plays Springsteen’s bruised, and bruising, father. And there is some welcome humor from Marc Maron, David Krumholtz and Paul Walter Hauser as the unconvinced colleagues surrounding this unconventional star.

(Interestingly, the E Street Band don’t really figure in this at all. Although we glimpse them onstage and in the studio, not one of them even gets a line.)

Jeremy Allen White in “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.”

But while the acting is all on-key — the ensemble as perfect tuned as a tight band — the writing and direction is sometimes uncertain. Worse, it’s too conventional. Like last year’s Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” it is never as adventurous as the artist it is about; one scene plays expectedly, explicitly into another. (How to show Springsteen’s interest in Flannery O’Connor’s stories and spree killer Charlie Stalkweather? Simply cut to closeups of Springsteen picking up a book by O’Connor, and watching “Badlands” on TV.)

Also, like James Mangold with the Dylan film, Cooper only understands part of what goes into making a great pop song. Like Mangold, he gives us endless shots of his hero scribbling down lyrics — albeit almost always fully formed, first-draft masterpieces. But where does the music itself come from? How did “Born in the USA” go from slow, acoustic demo into the ironic, stadium-rattling hit we know today? Cooper doesn’t show us because he doesn’t have a clue.

Also striking false? A romance that begins after a fan chats up Springsteen outside The Stone Pony. It’s not a relationship that Springsteen wrote about in his own memoirs of those times, and even if it has any basis in fact, it feels like a screenwriter’s invention. The details — a Jersey Girl waitressing down the Shore, a single mom whose only escape is rock ‘n’ roll — feels not like real life, but a really calculated attempt to mimic a Springsteen song.

Better are the movie’s broad strokes, and small touches. Graham and Gaby Hoffmann are powerful as Springsteen’s battling parents. The real-life New York and New Jersey locations — working-class towns, late-night diners, well-weathered boardwalks — have the bittersweet tug of old home movies.

And the movie is unflinching in its exploration of Springsteen’s emotional challenges at the time — which can be its own challenge. Drama gets much of its power from conflict: The protagonist has a goal, and must overcome obstacles to achieve it. But how do you dramatize an internal obstacle? How do you find action in depression, a state that can mire people in inaction, in painful passivity, in silent hopelessness?

Ultimately, “Deliver Me From Nowhere” finds its way.

Just as Springsteen did in real life.
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Bruce Springsteen at The New York Film Festival.

After the screening, the director, the cast, and Landau and Springsteen took the stage. Springsteen thanked White for “playing a much better-looking version of me,” and Cooper for bringing his late parents back to life. “They’re all gone now, so it’s nice to have this piece of film,” he said.

And then the cast and crew left the stage, and left Bruce in his true comfort zone — standing before an audience, with a guitar.

“Last thoughts,” he began. “These days we have daily events reminding us of the fact that we’re living through these particularly dangerous times. I spent my life on the road, I’ve been moving around the world as kind of a musical ambassador for America … trying to measure the distance between American reality, where we’ve often fallen short of our ideals, and the American Dream. I’ve seen that America, as battered as she feels right now. But for a lot of folks out there, she continues to be a land of hope and dreams, not of fear or divisiveness or government censorship or hatred. That America is worth fighting for. So it’s in that spirit, I brought along my lifelong weapon of choice: the guitar. …”

Then he launched into “Land of Hope and Dreams” (watch below).

And afterwards, before walking off the stage, he left the audience with a simple message, maybe drawn from the film and definitely tailored to these times.

“Stay strong.”
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