The most unfortunate thing about “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” is that the film, fundamentally, does everything right. The plot is trackable, director Scott Cooper doesn’t make any jaw-dropping choices and stars Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong turn in strong performances as the titular rock star and his manager, respectively.
What results is a product that is thoroughly predictable, unimaginative and set firmly in simplicity. When it comes to Springsteen — nicknamed “the Boss,” — and particularly the complex, deeply emotional subject matter the film attempts to tackle, the fundamentals are hardly the only things the film needs to succeed.
The film follows budding rock star Bruce Springsteen as executives at Columbia Records eagerly await his next musical endeavor following the success of his tour and hit song “Hungry Heart.” Inspired by the pressures of growing fame, a blossoming relationship with a young single mother, Faye (Odessa Young), and the reality of his troubled childhood, Bruce equips himself with an outdated recording kit, his guitar technician (Paul Walter Hauser), his notebook and pen and a makeshift studio in the bedroom of a rural New Jersey home, where he begins composing songs for what he is determined to make his next artistic move: a raw, emotional, deeply set folk album he calls “Nebraska.”
White’s brooding, introspective portrayal of Springsteen is grounded and right up his alley — yet another man troubled by his problematic family who seeks comfort in his own artistry, much like a Carmen Berzatto or a Kerry Von Erich. Even if critics claim White’s recent roles have become repetitive, he undeniably succeeds in each: he commands the screen with a presence much greater than his stature and delivers a vocally excellent performance re-recording Springsteen’s songs for the film. However, even White’s efforts can’t salvage the film’s shortcomings.
The film, for one, is relentlessly underdeveloped — a structural mess with no room to ruminate on what makes Springsteen’s album so meaningful, a point so often spoken throughout the film but hardly ever shown. While Cooper’s screenplay resembles a cohesive story adapted from Warren Zanes’ 2023 novel, “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” there’s hardly any room to breathe between corporate tussling over “Nebraska’”and Springsteen’s internal conflicts.
What results is an adaptation that does justice to neither. Most disappointing is Cooper’s apparent failure to recognize the superiority of the latter over the former — a failure that prevents the film from deeply resonating with audiences.
The songs simply come to Springsteen. Audiences must do the heavy lifting connecting trite black-and-white flashbacks — largely featuring Springsteen’s father, Doug (Stephen Graham) — to the sudden appearance of a fully formed song. Creating this album doesn’t appear challenging for Springsteen, at least not directly.
Between uninspiring cutaways and B-roll of overpronounced note-taking, aimless strumming and a pitifully unrefined romance, no story is told. There’s a finished demo track, a distributed album and a lover lost through a barrage of montages that never allow one idea to ever truly stick.
It’s therefore difficult to grasp Springsteen’s insistence that he ‘dug deep’ on the album, as he explains in one scene to his manager, Jon Landau.
Admittedly, Strong does his best with a script that relegates Landau to a largely expository role. He often sits listening to Bruce, nodding and never challenging — an emotional crutch for Bruce to lean on that ultimately fails to bridge the gap between Springsteen’s emotional artistic process and the development of a commercially successful album.
Strong’s performance succeeds with what was on the page: he is thoughtful, reassuring and supportive. In one scene, Landau relents to his wife over Springsteen’s personal struggles. “I can’t reach him,” he sighs, before his larger role takes full effect and he provides the exposition that the film fails to supply itself.
The evident central conflict of “A Complete Unknown,” is the struggle Bob Dylan faces when his artistic desires don't align with the expectations of his fans and supporters. “Going electric,” as the title of the film’s source material suggests, was both controversial and risky for Dylan, and audiences were treated to a well-constructed exploration of his qualms as he forayed into rock and roll and electric instrumentation.
The unfortunate lack of clarity about Springsteen’s mental health struggles — the film’s supposed main conflict — held “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” from success.
If this were not the case, audiences would have left cinemas less focused on the technicalities of mastering a demo tape using outdated machinery — a plot point that consumes much of the second act’s runtime.
If this were not the case, the film would not have skipped nearly a year of pivotal therapy sessions that could have allowed a deeper examination of why Springsteen felt so strongly about preserving the rawest qualities of “Nebraska” — a fact the film never lets one forget while simultaneously failing to ever fully explain.
One can easily lament the film’s apparent lack of narrative priority, along with its false perception of sensitivity toward Springsteen’s troubling upbringing and its impact on his songwriting. These lamentations are validated upon experiencing the film’s woefully rushed conclusion, with no explanation of Doug’s apparent desire to reconnect with his son, no expansion on Springsteen’s improved mental well-being and every indication that the more important songs all along were the ones left off “Nebraska” — namely “Glory Days” and “Born in the U.S.A..”
There seems to be a biopic wave rushing through the entertainment industry at the moment — as of this article’s publication, three of the box office’s major films are biopics: “Christy,” “The Smashing Machine” and “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.”
The latter, in particular, feels emblematic of a streamlined, formulaic trend that has recently captured the lives of, to name a few, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Elton John, Freddie Mercury, Elvis Presley and Amy Winehouse, many met with awards-season buzz. The trend shows few signs of slowing; biopics about Fred Astaire, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Linda Ronstadt and each individual member of The Beatles are already slated for theaters in the coming years.
Perhaps the key to slowing down the biopic hype train lies in films like “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” — middling, thoroughly disappointing efforts that reveal how hollow the formula can be.
What could have — or, more wistfully, should have been delivered was a thoughtful, meditative exploration of Springsteen’s burgeoning career, particularly his struggles with depression that continue today.
Cooper’s undercooked effort, unfortunately, delivers next to nothing — nowhere.
