Last year, A Complete Unknown, rather than the usual cradle-to-grave musician biopic that Walk Hard was making fun of, perfected a different formula: “Biopic about a small slice of the life of a major rock star, based on an acclaimed recent biography, and starring a rising young actor.” James Mangold’s film, which starred Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan, rode that to eight Oscar nominations. Now there’s the Bruce Springsteen version, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, and while the Dylan movie seemed to make every right choice, its Springsteen counterpart makes most of the wrong ones.
Written and directed by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Black Mass) and adapted from Warren Zanes’ 2023 biography, the film’s set in 1982. Starring Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen, the story mostly concerns the making of the mournful acoustic album Nebraska, made at a time when his label bosses wanted something much more commercial. Other threads include Springsteen battling depression, conferring with his manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), romancing a Jersey Shore diner waitress (Odessa Young), and coming to terms with his tough childhood, especially his relationships with his parents (Stephen Graham and Gaby Hoffmann).
The good decisions in the film start, and nearly end, with Jeremy Allen White, who capably channels Springsteen both on-stage and off. His singing is a close-enough approximation, and he’s shot from various angles that make him look remarkably similar to the real pop star. White’s also playing a version of his chef character from The Bear, another tortured genius whose workaholism and demons preclude him from developing healthy relationships.
The film’s New Jersey detail is mostly spot-on, especially its depiction of the Asbury Park boardwalk, which, judging by the Tony Soprano talking-fish episode, doesn’t look too different these days from the 1980s. It’s just a shame about everything else.
Of all the stories throughout Springsteen’s more than 50-year career, why is this one a movie? I can think of a few better ideas, from his origin to the E Street Band reunion in the late-1990s, to Springsteen’s relationship with Clarence Clemons. The main thrust of the narrative, of Springsteen taking a huge risk on a personal non-commercial project, is undercut by the film repeatedly establishing that he’s got a potential hit album—Born in the USA—practically on the shelf and all set to go.
The romance subplot is a dud, while the film never really establishes what’s so special about Springsteen’s relationship with Jon Landau. And what of the E Street Band? We see them on stage and in the studio, but Clemons, Little Steven, Max Weinberg, and company barely figure in the film’s narrative. What did they think about Bruce concentrating on a project that effectively sidelined them? Were these longtime friends there for Springsteen during his Nebraska-era dark night? We don’t hear a word about that; I don’t think any of them even have speaking parts.
Marc Maron shows up in some studio scenes as recording engineer Chuck Plotkin, but there are two long sequences where he’s sitting behind a mixing board and doesn’t speak, and we’re left to wonder why Maron’s sitting there. David Krumholtz playing greedy Jewish record executives used to be such a trope that Seth Rogen made fun of it in his memoir, and here he is doing it again, as Columbia Records boss Al Teller.
The material with his parents is standard daddy-issues stuff, and the Springsteen on Broadway special has a much more complete and compelling take on Springsteen’s background, family life, and most other aspects of his early life and career.
Deliver Me From Nowhere never bothers to give Hoffmann a character to play as Adele Springsteen. The film has little handle on any of its female characters, and Odessa Young, as the girlfriend, doesn’t make much of an impression. However, Young’s resemblance to Courtney Love is such that I could imagine her in a biopic of either Love herself or Kurt Cobain.
Springsteen on Broadway, which is on Netflix, was the best of an endless series of documentaries over the last few years, most of them for streaming services, about Springsteen and the band, all directed by filmmaker Thom Zimny. Nearly all of them were more insightful than Deliver Me From Nowhere.