‘Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere’ Review: The Boss Deserves Better
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere may be the worst biopic of the decade thus far. Inert in ways that few movies on “tortured artists” are, the movie is entirely uninterested in the singer’s struggles with depression and the making of his ultimate masterpiece.
There isn’t a musical artist that deserves a biopic more than Bruce Springsteen, and how long this took to get (part of) his story to screen honestly feels criminal. It might have taken the commercial and Oscar-nominated success of James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown to move the needle, since Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is completely uninterested in the most “commercial” aspects of the singer’s life. His biggest hits and the skyrocketing adulation he experienced at a very early age are rarely mentioned here. In fact, the movie, based on Warren Zanes’ book of the same name, features only one concert performance (“Born to Run”), with the rest focusing on his most intimate and troubled time as an artist on a journey of self-discovery.
That “self-discovery” led to the release of his seminal masterpiece, “Nebraska,” which is highly regarded as one of the singer’s best albums, and has since been reappraised as one of the greatest folk albums in the history of popular music. It was a massive departure at the time from the commercial-sounding sounds he’s captured, because, we learn, the singer (played here by Jeremy Allen White) had been struggling with depression and reckoned with his past as a child, under the hands of his abusive, alcoholic father (played by Stephen Graham).
These flashback sequences, deftly shot in black-and-white by cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi (in his fifth collaboration with Cooper), should, in theory, bring us closer to the artist in ways we’ve never experienced before, but do the exact opposite. In fact, Cooper’s screenplay is the worst of his career. It’s one filled with painfully inert dialogues that never seriously treat difficult subjects like depression, alcoholism, mental health, and abuse, and instead cartoonishly depicts Springsteen’s childhood – and, by extension, his isolation in Colts Neck – as a “checkbox” to fill rather than a psychologically active portrait of the artist’s most complex period.
“Nebraska” was a watershed moment for Springsteen, both in his professional and personal life. There was intense debate amongst record producers Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) and Al Teller (David Krumholtz) on whether or not this album would help (or worsen) his career, as he needs to capitalize on the recent success of “Hungry Heart,” not do the opposite of what is expected from him and formally experiment in ways he never did before. Why was there such massive opposition for the artist to do what he wanted at a period when he could surprise his most ardent fans? And most importantly, why was it essential for Bruce to suddenly stop the crazy ride, we learn, he has been on for several years to embark on the tormented process of writing his most personal – and complex – album, secluded from everyone else, with only one recording engineer (played by Paul Walter Hauser) at his side?
These questions should theoretically be at the heart of Cooper’s project, an examination of the artist at his most vulnerable. Unfortunately, the Crazy Heart filmmaker refuses to make them the core of the project. It would rather present this “watershed moment” as a quasi-Wikipedia bio, where we only get the surface of what happened (Springsteen watching Terrence Malick’s Badlands and being inspired to write a song on the Starkweather murders, or seeing a mansion on a hill, and writing the lyrics “Mansion on the hill”) instead of deepening it further than the text on the encyclopedia states it verbatim. Cooper desperately tries to fill in the gaps with those aforementioned black-and-white flashbacks, and while they are stunningly shot and look phenomenal on an IMAX screen (thanks in no small part to Takayanagi being one of the best directors of photography working today), they add almost zero texture to the whole package.
We instead spend most of its tedious 120-minute runtime in endless platitudes where a depressed Springsteen writes words on a page, records songs, writes words on a page, records songs, stares at an empty wall, wondering what’s going on, writes words on a page, records songs, argues with Jon Landau and producer Chuck Plotkin (Marc Maron) on the sounds of the Nebraska album, gets further depressed, writes words on a page, and so on. There’s no interiority or deeper examination of the why behind this creative process. Cooper seems utterly uninterested in this and instead populates this dull biopic with as many references to his most popular songs (Paul Schrader’s Born in the U.S.A. screenplay as a basis for his next album) as he does to helping us understand what this album means for Bruce at his most personal level.
Of course, fans of The Boss may enjoy a jam session where Jeremy Allen White lip-syncs “Born in the U.S.A.” (Bohemian Rhapsody? Anyone?), but beyond those fan-servicey sequences that serve to jingle keys everyone’s faces, what does this movie have to offer? “Nebraska” is such an incredible album, which still teaches its audience something to hold onto over forty years after its release. Reducing it to its most boring aspects is a feat in and of itself because the record's complexities are still analyzed to this day. Sadly, the audience never gets anything of note from White’s Springsteen that makes them aware of the significance of keeping the sounds of the recording sessions intact or maintaining the album's stripped-back musical patterns for the album’s release. There’s no examination; only pointing out things that happened, with little context or development.
Whether or not you liked A Complete Unknown, you should give Mangold (and screenwriter Jay Cocks) credit that the movie does peer into Bob Dylan’s tormented psyche, as folk music was on the cusp of a watershed moment if he decides to “go electric.” Traditionalists (like Pete Seeger) vehemently opposed this shift, but for music to evolve in the direction it eventually went, Dylan had to go electric when he did. It’s a repetitive, but intimate portrait of the artist’s most important contribution to the advancement of folk music. In contrast, there’s no urgency to the opposition we see in Deliver Me from Nowhere. There’s no urgency because none of us feels what Springsteen experiences deep inside his mind, regardless of the fairly solid performance Allen White delivers on the exterior as The Boss, with no desire to deepen what’s on the page.
Strong is sadly (once again) miscast as Landau, in a role that never examines what he means to Bruce, and who Bruce is as a human being. We never get a sense that these are best friends who are always there for one another, because the inner conflict the singer experiences seems frivolous to Cooper, who never captures it with the intimacy needed to make a movie like this feel genuinely moving. He instead distills the most challenging period of Springsteen’s life into a lethargic and repetitive bore, whose screenplay is so painfully lifeless that it eventually leads to a Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox story conclusion, where Springsteen explains that he never sat on his dad’s lap and that, through a final text, “he continued to struggle with depression, but never again without help or hope.”
With this text acting like a massive wet fart, this lifelong fan of Bruce Springsteen felt personally insulted that his life – and most tormented creative endeavor – would be represented in such a facile, unengaging, and painfully dull way, with no interest in wanting to explore who Springsteen is behind the façade he adopts in public. The Boss deserves so much better than Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. So much better. Here’s hoping an eventual “second take” on his life will do it more justice than Cooper’s navel-gazing excuse of a “biopic.”