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In his book “It Ain’t No Sin To Be Glad You’re Alive,” Eric Alterman recounts a classically zany David Letterman bit from sometime during Bruce Springsteen’s imperial phase: “Pick the subject that is not the subject of a Bruce Springsteen song: (1) Driving down the old highway, (2) Driving with girls, (3) Driving in New Jersey, (4) Sushi.” This was Letterman, of course, poking a little fun at Springsteen’s predilection for making cars the subject of his songs. And that is a colorfully extended way to ask, guess where the trailer of the new movie “Deliver Me from Nowhere,” based on Warren Zanes’s book of the same title chronicling Springsteen recording his 1982 album “Nebraska,” begins? With Bruce in a car. Is that a little wink and a nod to kick things off, or cause to worry? Granted, he’s not driving down the old highway, or with a girl, or in New Jersey, he’s just sitting in the car in a dealership parking lot. And though the dialogue between he and the salesman is on the nose, I didn’t mind for how it quickly conveyed Springsteen’s very real headspace when he made that album. And anyway, what can one truly glean from a two-minute preview about the quality of a full-length feature film? Next to nothing, that’s typically what, and so we can’t really know if “Deliver Me from Nowhere” is going to be, say, “Elvis,” or if it’s going to one more musical biopic that doesn’t realize it’s exactly what “Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story” was satirizing.
One of the first details you will notice in the trailer is how it slips from color photography in the present-day scenes to black and white for the past. It might come across obvious, but “Nebraska” is an album that feels like it’s in black and white, with minimalist presentation, all acoustic, and with Springsteen having said the album was inspired in part by old monochrome family photographs, visually cued in the trailer. Yet, even if the moment glimpsed of a young Springsteen and his father boxing in the living room is drawn from a story Bruce tells in his autobiography, it can’t help but feel a little Dewey Cox-ish. Seeing that, you can almost imagine a scene where Springsteen sits down with the TEAC four-track in his bedroom to record and his guitar tech Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser) breaks the fourth wall to look into the camera and say, “Bruce Springsteen has to think about his entire life before he plays.” (Shudders.)
I will say, the out of time sensation seems smartly conveyed in the movie’s aesthetic which is not leaning too hard on its early 80s setting – it hardly looks like the 80s at all, or at least, how pop culture wants us to think the 80s always looked.
One funny thing, I think at least in part because of that album cover, a monochrome image of a cloudy sky through a car windshield, and because the album was recorded in early January in his bedroom, I always pictured Springsteen recording it in harsh grey winter light coming through the bedroom window. But then, Springsteen was always a night owl, and so the low lighting that we glimpse in the recording session feels right.
Jeremy Allen White feels right too, at least in so far as I can discern, which is to say, he doesn’t seem to be going for mimicry.
Jeremy Strong felt like perfectly casting from the jump as Jon Landau, Springsteen’s longtime partner and producer, and just as much, evangelist. But boy, that Landau monologue running through the whole trailer raises some red flags. In it, he talks about Bruce as a repairman, and that the singer needs to repair himself, which sounds a bit platitudinous given the circumstances. Landau has often said the first thing he thought of when he heard the “Nebraska” recordings was fear for his charge’s mental health. Then again, this monologue could just be the sort of evangelizing spiel that would have been required to convince Columbia Records to release an acoustic record that Springsteen recorded in his bedroom, that age-old divide between art and business.
But that’s the other thing. When Landau gets done talking about Bruce needing to “repair the hole in himself,” he says, “Once he’s done with that, he’s going to repair the entire world.” Uh. Leave aside for a second that it skews a little too close to how Tom Cruise perceived himself in the recent “Mission: Impossible” movie and consider that what he’s talking about there is “Born in the U.S.A.,” the epic album that followed “Nebraska” and that flowed directly out of the “Nebraska” recordings, including the title track. As Zanes says in his book, these two albums are the two halves of Springsteen. “‘Nebraska’ was the pulling back of the bow,” Zanes wrote, “and ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ was the arrow’s release.” That’s important, but the way this monologue phrases it makes it sound like the entire world can only be repaired through 30 million in album sales.
Holy shit! Is that David Krumholtz as Al Teller, then-President of Columbia Records?! It is! And if nothing else, “Deliver Me from Nowhere” honors what Cinema Romantico has long proposed as an official Hollywood rule: every major motion picture must feature at least one actor from “Slums of Beverly Hills.”
Jeremy Strong felt like perfectly casting from the jump as Jon Landau, Springsteen’s longtime partner and producer, and just as much, evangelist. But boy, that Landau monologue running through the whole trailer raises some red flags. In it, he talks about Bruce as a repairman, and that the singer needs to repair himself, which sounds a bit platitudinous given the circumstances. Landau has often said the first thing he thought of when he heard the “Nebraska” recordings was fear for his charge’s mental health. Then again, this monologue could just be the sort of evangelizing spiel that would have been required to convince Columbia Records to release an acoustic record that Springsteen recorded in his bedroom, that age-old divide between art and business.
But that’s the other thing. When Landau gets done talking about Bruce needing to “repair the hole in himself,” he says, “Once he’s done with that, he’s going to repair the entire world.” Uh. Leave aside for a second that it skews a little too close to how Tom Cruise perceived himself in the recent “Mission: Impossible” movie and consider that what he’s talking about there is “Born in the U.S.A.,” the epic album that followed “Nebraska” and that flowed directly out of the “Nebraska” recordings, including the title track. As Zanes says in his book, these two albums are the two halves of Springsteen. “‘Nebraska’ was the pulling back of the bow,” Zanes wrote, “and ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ was the arrow’s release.” That’s important, but the way this monologue phrases it makes it sound like the entire world can only be repaired through 30 million in album sales.
Indeed, while the trailer includes the haunting title track to “Nebraska,” based on the Starkweather-Fugate crime spree, it concludes with the title track to “Born to Run.” It’s as if the Columbia execs had said, hey, “‘Nebraska’s’ great and all but we need a single, can you just re-record ‘Born to Run’ and sneak that on there?” In fact, I can absolutely imagine someone from 20th Century Studios saying, “You can’t have the trailer for the first Bruce Springsteen movie and not include ‘Born to Run.’” It’s almost enough to make one worry “Deliver Me from Nowhere” will be the kind of movie that puts “Reason to Believe” over the closing credits while the irony goes right over its head. I guess I’ll try and find my own reason to believe that it won’t.
