Film
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere limits itself to one crucial sliver of the Boss’s life to escape the clichés, but it’s a biopic through and through. By Tansy Gardam.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere a trip through the tropes
The music biopic is less a genre than a collection of clichés: the troubled childhood, the talented dreamer, the disbelieving record exec, the mundane stories behind hit songs, the rise, the fall, getting clean, getting the girl and some text before the credits summing up album sales. It is a setlist so set that the ultimate bio-parody, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, pre-dates Bohemian Rhapsody by more than a decade.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere attempts to break free from the form by limiting itself to one crucial sliver of Bruce Springsteen’s life. At the end of 1981, after The River tour and his first top 10 single, Springsteen retreated to a New Jersey farmhouse and recorded an intimate acoustic demo tape of songs that thrummed with violence and disaffection. The singer intended it only as a starting point for another record with the E Street Band, but soon found that re-recording or fleshing out the songs only diminished them, and he eventually released the lo-fi demos as Nebraska, a folk-infused dirge for middle America.
The album became an unlikely hit but didn’t bring the relief Springsteen needed from his depression. Like so many of his songs’ heroes, he hit the road, but the darkness went with him, pushing Springsteen to seek professional mental healthcare.
The story is ripe for a screen treatment: a tale of artistic integrity mixed with the struggles of a sensitive man whose demons aren’t the trappings of fame but an uncontrollable bleakness inherited from his father. There are even big hits for the casual fans – “Born in the U.S.A.” began life on the demo and was recorded in early ’82 before being shelved until Springsteen could get Nebraska out of his system.
This very narrow focus ends up undermining the story – by limiting itself to Nebraska, the film fails to capture what made that album such a radical departure. The Springsteen of legend, the all-American rock star, is implied but never seen. When the film opens with the closing night of The River tour, Jeremy Allen White’s Springsteen is already a tightly wound spring – his imitation of the Boss’s rasp renders him exhausted and worn thin from his first words. Within minutes he’s off to his farmhouse to stare plaintively into the middle distance. The isolation doesn’t feel out of character because it’s the only version of the character we get.
Springsteen’s music gets a similar treatment. Nebraska’s haunting, unfinished style was in direct contrast with the perfectionist, band-driven sound that Springsteen doggedly pursued from Born To Run and finally perfected on The River. But even in Deliver Me from Nowhere’s sole concert scene, the sound-mix heavily favours White’s vocals and the crowd, reducing the E Street Band to a footnote. When Dylan went electric in James Mangold’s biopic-by-numbers A Complete Unknown, at least you knew what he sounded like acoustic.
Director and screenwriter Scott Cooper takes his visual cue from Nebraska, capturing Springsteen’s childhood flashbacks in black and white, and the film’s present in a warm but limited colour palette that, combined with the costuming, feels more mid 1970s than early ’80s. The cinematography is loose, handheld and unfussy – conversations are often captured in long takes, but the camera never draws attention to itself. White plays Springsteen as a man who cannot express or even understand his emotions without a guitar to hide behind, but his performance comes into direct conflict with an overwritten script that’s peppered with emotional thesis statements.
Cooper assumes a high level of Springsteen knowledge from his audience and fails to clearly establish the precipice the star’s career was on. Casual audiences may be pleasantly surprised to discover Springsteen’s depths but will struggle to identify exactly when the film takes place. The details Cooper does focus on are almost fetishistically specific – the orange shag carpet of Springsteen’s farmhouse, the exact model of recorder he used (TEAC 144), the Echoplex effect he applied to the demo to imitate early Elvis records. In showing the precise process and inspirations behind songs, Cooper robs them of any ambiguity – he matches scenes from Terrence Malick’s Badlands with Springsteen’s childhood, pushing Springsteen to rewrite the album’s title track in first person with no uncertainty of who he sees in the violent story.
Even as the film’s time period limits the number of biopic tropes it can use, it still exploits plenty. When asked if the title track has a name, Springsteen croaks, “I was gonna call it ‘Starkweather’… but now I’m thinking ‘Nebraska’.” Manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) makes an impassioned defence of the album’s genius when the record executives just don’t get it. Springsteen’s troubled childhood threads through the film and is creatively channelled into mundane stories behind songs. “Mansion on the Hill” is the worst offender, where the song’s lyrics are captured beat for beat, forcing the film to admit that Springsteen has a sister who is never seen before or again.
Amid this forensic re-creation and trip through tropes, the film’s heart is entirely fictional: a romance between Springsteen and a New Jersey single mother who represents everything he has run towards and away from. Faye (Odessa Young) lives the American life Springsteen sings about – pay cheque to pay cheque, finding solace in rock’n’roll – so it’s ironic that, thanks to Young’s magnetic performance, she is the film’s greatest liberty and its most real character. With her blue eye shadow and red leather jacket, Faye is the only person who really lives in Reagan’s America, but she exists to be left behind, a mishmash of all the other girls Springsteen sent away.
Instead, the film’s resolution rests on Springsteen’s father, Douglas, whose tough-love parenting and mental illness haunt Bruce. Stephen Graham makes for a menacing figure in the flashbacks precisely because his violence is ambiguous and unpredictable, but in the film’s present he becomes doughy and vague, stripped of his power by time and alcohol.
In defiance of biopic tropes, there is no screaming confrontation or big third-act moment where Bruce throws his success in his father’s face. When Douglas tries to make amends in the film’s final scene, it is a clumsy imitation of how he thinks this scene should go, getting his 30-something son to sit on his lap as he admits he wasn’t terribly good to Bruce. The awkwardness oozes through the scene and makes it one of the film’s most arresting as Bruce chooses to take the apology in good faith, even as he insists he has never sat on his father’s lap before. The scene is less “My Father’s House” and more “Reason To Believe”, an upbeat ending about clinging to hope in spite of all the evidence.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is ultimately for the fans – people who can fill in the gaps that Cooper left in the story and who already understand Springsteen had always hidden pain and impotent rage behind catchy hooks. While Nebraska is musically an outlier, lyrically it is a natural evolution from The River and laid the groundwork for Born in the U.S.A. That’s where Deliver Me from Nowhere takes its final cue from the album – its limited scope might make it an outlier, but it’s still a biopic, through and through.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is screening in cinemas nationally.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 22, 2025 as "One for the fans".
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