It is always, always interesting to see art about the making of other art. The choices people make, why those choices resonate, whether those choices were deliberate or accidental, and how much people get into their own way is always fascinating to watch. It certainly helps if you have a personal connection to the art, but this is not always necessary. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is about how Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) ended up making his album Nebraska, released in 1982 as one of the first major DIY recordings. That album remains a highly influential and important piece of art, but unfortunately this movie only really works if you’re already a die-hard fan of the artist.
The reasons for this are two-fold. The first is that Bruce Springsteen remains very much alive, making music, touring with his band and maintaining a tight control over his own legacy. Writer-director Scott Cooper, who adapted the screenplay from the nonfiction book by Warren Zanes, is clearly aiming to please him instead of us. The second is that it is now a depressing cliché in movies about musicians that while the boys are based on real people, the girls are not. And this is because, to put it politely, the love life of famous people can be so checkered that an honest depiction of their romantic behaviour wouldn’t get past the lawyers. For example, back in 2015, Dr. Dre’s partner wasn’t even mentioned in Straight Outta Compton (probably because of all the times he beat her up and shot at her), and the girlfriend character in 2024’s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown was the only one with a fictional name from the famous real-life counterpart.
So it raises a few red flags that Faye (Odessa Young), the younger sister of someone Bruce knew in high school, who’s now a chess-playing single mom with the Farrah Fawcett haircut, is completely and totally fictional. If the movie is trying to establish Bruce’s working-class bona fides by having the big famous rock star improve his recuperative yet artistic solitude by squiring a waitress around town, it’s trying too hard. If the truth was that there was a parade of different beauties through the house every night, would that really be so surprising for someone young, famous, good-looking and lucky? Or was something more sordid happening – or perhaps even more surprising, no romance at all?
Either way, by being so completely fictional in one aspect of it means that the entire movie cannot be trusted. It becomes a biopic along the lines of a child’s drawing instead of one with nuance and heart. The implications that as his fame and success began to take off, Bruce felt compelled to revisit his painful childhood in order not to sink into depression, are clearly lines someone is feeding us for a reason. Whether that’s the director or Mr. Springsteen himself, whatever that reason is unfortunately stinks. The choice to film the childhood flashback scenes, in which Stephen Graham and Gaby Hoffman play Bruce’s unhappy parents, in black-and-white is also an inappropriate distancing technique.
This is all very harsh, because in the moment the movie slips along beautifully. New Jersey has rarely looked prettier on film. There’s plenty of technical recording discussions to satisfy the music nerd dads who will come out in droves for this, with the hey-it’s-that-guy satisfaction of recognising Paul Walter Hauser, Marc Maron and David Krumholtz in those scenes. Pamela Martin’s editing does a great job of balancing the pace, whenever Jeremy Strong shows up (as Bruce’s manager) he’s like a shot of adrenaline, and the short clips of the movies Badlands and Night of the Hunter emphasise the darker American histories that the album ended up dwelling on. That was less of a cliché back then, too. Mr. White, who is one of the only actors in recent memory to become famous playing working-class characters, conveys the thoughtfulness, the talent and the intensity that has enabled the real Mr. Springsteen to maintain his real-life career. But when your work of art about a struggle for authenticity ends up feeling so fake, something’s gone very badly wrong.
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is now in theaters.
Learn more about the film, including how to watch it, at the official website for the title.
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