Review: Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere

Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox.

It's funny that in the past year there has been a movie about Bob Dylan going electric, while hiding behind the mask of the persona Bob Dylan as he releases his most commercial - and among his best - work, and another about Bruce Springsteen going acoustic while laying himself bare as he composes his least commercial - and one of his best - works to date.

Jeremy Allen White digs deep as The Boss and delivers a strong performance in a biopic that does what many of the best of the genre do: Rather than being an all-encompassing film about a musician, it picks a particular moment in their life that acts as a lens through which we can consider their entire career or mythos.

In the case of Cooper's film, the period in which we find Springsteen is the early 1980s following his commercial success with "The River" record and his first top 10 hit ("Hungry Heart"). Seemingly nervous about the stardom that seems sure to come his way - and will two years later with his blockbuster "Born in the U.S.A" record - Springsteen, possibly led by depression, barricades himself in a room and records the spare, haunting "Nebraska" album.

Surely the only record ever to be inspired by the killing spree of Charles Starkweather - we see Bruce watching Terence Malick's classic "Badlands," which stars Martin Sheen as that notorious criminal - "Nebraska" was an album with only Springsteen on the guitar, no backup band, and captured on a four-track TEAC 144 Portastudio recorder that results in an echoey haunted sound as if it were an object out of time. 

Springsteen was apparently inspired by Suicide's self-titled underground record for the album's overall vibe and, sure enough, there's a moment in which a friend (Paul Walter Hauser) seems alarmed when Bruce is lying on the floor and listening to that record's most harrowing track, "Frankie Teardrop."

All the while, Springsteen strikes up a relationship with a single mother, Faye (Odessa Young), that seems doomed from the start and is haunted by memories of his childhood - rendered in black and white - during which his father (Stephen Graham) was abusive toward him and his mother (Gaby Hoffman). 

The songs written in that solitary New Jersey room - "Nebraska," "Mansion on the Hill," "State Trooper" and the all-timer "Atlantic City" - are all bleak stories of criminals, killers, and people living on the edge. There's a powerful moment in which we see Springsteen writing the lyrics to "Nebraska," thinking back on his troubled childhood, and then changing the "he" in the song - which refers to Starkweather - to "I" or "me."

Two of the most compelling threads in the film are Springsteen's depression, which is hinted at during the film's earlier moments before exploding into the foreground late in the picture, and his friendship with manager and producer Jon Landau (an excellent Jeremy Strong), who comes armed with support and great Flannery O'Connor quotes. Unlike so many other biopics, "Deliver Me from Nowhere" finds the most interesting angles of this story and focuses on them, rather than all the typical stuff you'd expect.

Lastly, this is a biopic that actually provides some insight into its subject. In case you hadn't noticed, Springsteen has been routinely criticizing our Dear Leader during recent concerts and the sequences in this film in which he confronts his father during childhood provide a window into the soul of a man who doesn't like bullying. It's also curious when the film that his father takes him to as a child is the likely scarring "The Night of the Hunter," in which a sinister Robert Mitchum terrorizes a family. 

I stand by my assertion that Todd Haynes' Dylan fantasmagoria "I'm Not There" remains the all-time champ for music biopics - and, hell, the Chalamet Dylan picture was good as well. "Deliver Me from Nowhere" might not be quite on that level, but it's an engaging film about a beloved musician that isn't a hagiography, nor a rousing success story, but rather an introspective view into a period in which the artist was struggling emotionally, but soaring creatively.