Review: Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

There are two possible audiences for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, and they want very different things from this biopic. As befits the story of the making of Springsteen's classic album Nebraska, one audience wants a deep dive into the details, a case of history brought to life - or at least, heavily referenced. The other wants a movie about who Bruce Springsteen is, a character study that brings the man to life instead. The big problem here is that it tries to do both.

At first it seems like this often moody and introspective film has sidestepped one of biopics usual potholes. Rather than covering the entire sweep of his life, Springsteen - here played by Jeremy Allen White - is just recording Nebraska while struggling with undiagnosed depression. So by focusing in on the small details of one of his biggest artistic triumphs (he's also recording tracks like 'Born in the USA' at the same time), we get the big picture? 

Well, no. Thanks to a powerhouse performance from White, Springsteen is a compelling figure throughout, getting at emotional truths even when it's obvious the film is fudging details. And the parts where the story is happy to just present elements without explanation - Springsteen, despite being a massive star, seems to like blowing off steam by playing guitar with a bar band in a local dive - we rapidly get a sense of what kind of man he is.

But then there's a bunch of reductive flashbacks to his childhood where his boozy dad (Stephen Graham) is bad news but means well, turning a bunch of Springsteen songs into mysteries to be solved (who knew or cared that there was a literal 'mansion on the hill' that inspired the song of the same title). At least his doomed relationship with local single mother Faye (Odessa Young) has the benefit of not being used as direct inspiration for some well-known song.

Unfortunately, despite decent chemistry between the characters, pretty much every scene with Springsteen and his manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) is a leaden clunk of exposition, where everyone is utterly supportive of Springsteen while being in theory a little worried about the massively non-commercial direction his new album is taking. 

These scenes alternate between infodump speeches - Landau's wife (Grace Gummer) has a hilariously thankless role as the silent sounding board for his semi-regular updates on what stage the plot is currently up to - and the kind of "we're doing this The Boss' way or not at all!" confrontations that sound like Landau (who's still Springsteen's manager) had his lawyers go over the script to make sure he was presented in exactly the right light. 

And yet, the scenes where Springsteen tries to record 4-track demos in his bedroom for what would become Nebraska, and then decides he wants to put the demos out despite the sound being sub-par - re-recording them only made them worse in his opinion - are amongst the films best, simply by setting up a real problem and showing how it was solved.

If this could have somehow left out the history (do we really need to know 'Cover Me' was originally intended for Donna Summer?) and just focused solely on how someone puts together a record as memorable as Nebraska, it might have been something special. At least the music - of which there is plenty - is always ready to lift things up

Especially when The Boss is just chilling at home listening to Suicide's first album, which here seems to be nothing more than a bunch of inhuman screaming.

- Anthony Morris