Filmmaker Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, an adaptation of Warren Zanes’s book, opens on a sweaty, spent Bruce Springsteen in 1982 as he’s backstage, catching his breath after another herculean three-hour set, the kind that had already become legend on this tour.
Up to that point, Springsteen’s career had followed a jagged, uncertain climb. The River (1980) was his first No. 1 record; Born to Run (1975), despite its current ubiquity, had only moderate success upon release; and its follow-up, Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), fared even worse. The label’s romance with the blue-collar bard was beginning to fade.
So, what does an artist do when commercial faith begins to wane? If your name is Bruce Springsteen, you stand on conviction. You hole up in a bedroom with a four-track recorder and produce Nebraska, a sparse, acoustic LP lined with haunting murder ballads and outlaw elegies, and insist, with near-religious certainty, that there be no singles, no press, no tour. Cooper’s film is about the creation of that record, and the man who chose to retreat into silence just as the world was beginning to hear him.
Jeremy Allen White delivers an impressively convincing Bruce Springsteen, right down to the drawl, the posture, and the unshowy charisma that effortlessly conveys the joy Springsteen found in performing. It’s immediately clear from the ebullient stage scenes why he never felt the need to delve into narcotics.
His stage scenes with the E Street Band have an almost documentary realism; his quieter moments, particularly those with women, reveal a more withdrawn, introspective side of the artist. Odessa Young plays Faye Romano, a fleeting love interest who, though not a real figure in Springsteen’s life, is an effigy for his failed relationships during this period. The film suggests that his fixation on his fraught and tumultuous relationship with his father left him emotionally adrift, unable to build or sustain a family of his own.
The film’s emotional anchor, however, lies in Springsteen’s relationship with Jon Landau, played with equal conviction by Jeremy Strong. Landau is portrayed not merely as a manager but as a true believer and friend. While Springsteen toils in his bedroom to write and record, Landau works behind the scenes, convincing studio executives to trust in Springsteen and release his commercially unorthodox project.
Among the film’s most compelling moments is on set in the Atlantic Records studio: a vexed Springsteen halts the session to protest the overproduction swallowing his songs. “The band is overpowering and drowning out the material,” he insists, pleading for the raw intimacy that would become Nebraska. It’s a perfect microcosm of Cooper’s thesis: sometimes less is infinitely more.
Cooper also confronts the darker undercurrent of this period: Springsteen’s depression. “The days are getting shorter,” he confides to Landau, adrift between fame and authenticity. The making of Nebraska becomes not just an artistic exercise but an act of self-rescue and rediscovery. He routinely reminds Landau that he wants to create cohesive albums and tell stories, not be relegated to churning out hit singles.
‘THE MORNING SHOW’ OUTGROWS ITS SUBJECT
Yet Deliver Me from Nowhere isn’t all gloom and gallows. These same years birthed the anthemic optimism of “Born in the U.S.A.,” released amid the Reagan-era surge of patriotism. Though often interpreted as a protest, the song’s thundering chorus and red-white-and-blue iconography overwhelm its irony. Springsteen may be a liberal Democrat who stumped for former President Barack Obama and the Clintons, but his ethos of discipline, family, self-reliance, and faith in the working man is profoundly Reaganite.
Nebraska has long been my favorite Springsteen record, and the film’s intimate recreations of its conception, drafting “My Father’s House,” sketching “Atlantic City,” are deeply satisfying. Cooper rejects the standard rock biopic formula; instead of a blockbuster, rise-to-stardom hagiography, he offers something rarer: a raw, unembellished portrait of an artist at his best and worst. In that sense, Deliver Me from Nowhere mirrors Nebraska itself is spare, haunted, and steadfastly human. For those of us who never saw Springsteen in his prime, it’s the next best thing: a reminder of what made him, and his music, special.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.
