Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere

When Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) tells his manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) to tell the record company that he wants no press for his latest album, “Nebraska,” he says it’s not so much because he doesn’t want to explain the record as he couldn’t even explain the record in the first place. It’s a good window into the all-acoustic, out of step 1982-released “Nebraska” itself but it’s an equally good window into writer/director Scott Cooper’s difficult task in adapting Warren Zanes’s book about the album’s recording: how do you make a movie about a making a record the artist can’t explain? And it’s why I admired Cooper for eschewing the standard biopic template, not telling the Boss’s story from the beginning but seeking to capture a moment in time, one in which an on-the-cusp-of-superstardom Bruce Springsteen forged one of his most revered records while in the throes of considerable emotional and mental struggles. The problem is, even if “Deliver Me from Nowhere” wants to put us in that headspace, it can’t. 

“Deliver Me from Nowhere” begins with Springsteen ending his latest tour and hunkering down in a temporary New Jersey home where he plans to demo some new material on a four-track cassette recorder with guitar tech Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser) functioning as makeshift producer and Bruce’s bedroom functioning as makeshift studio. “I want it to sound like I’m in the room by himself,” he notes, hinting at an isolation from the world around him born at least part from his depression. These are abstract concepts, however, to show on screen and rather than unlock his imagination, Cooper resorts to humdrum biopic convention like black and white flashbacks to Springsteen’s mentally ill father (Stephen Graham) and inventing a diner waitress girlfriend, Faye (Odessa Young), with whom the singer-songwriter can’t bring himself to connect. That uninspired approach with the screenplay trickles down to the direction, reducing White’s turn to nothing, really, but a series of disconnected emotionally constipated poses in which the actor strains to show us something but just winds up signifying nothing. And White never looks worse than when he’s opposite Hauser, the former’s effortful acting standing in harsh contrast to the latter’s effortlessness. 

Though much of “Deliver Me from Nowhere” ostensibly turns on Springsteen’s creative process, Cooper fatally fails in bringing that creative process to life. Springsteen famously culled his album’s title track from the plot of Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” and though we see the character watching the movie on late-night TV, there is no sense of why it moved him, or how it connected to what he was feeling, just as one scene of him revising the lyrics from the third person to the first is an unsatisfactory literalization of putting himself into the song without conveying why he thought it so personal. What’s more, there is no sense of his awakening social and political consciousness, one that gave rise to “Born in the U.S.A.,” which we see come to life in the studio in the movie’s most thrilling sequence, because Cooper infuses virtually no sense of the larger world and how the songs written during this period were an echo of it. “Deliver Me from Nowhere” might lead you to believe that song was just a telling of Paul Schrader’s bar band screenplay with the same title, a script we see Landau give to Springsteen, though that is not even a little bit true. 

Odd as it might sound, the only real glimpse of the outside world is when we see Bruce listening to Foreigner’s 1981 hit “Urgent” on his car radio. I enjoyed it simply for seeing Bruce Springsteen listening to Foreigner but in its own unexpected way, it also puts into perspective the pop culture climate into which he wanted to release “Nebraska,” the seeming folly of such a choice. In making it, Landau and his team have to move some measure of mountain and earth to follow through, but unlike 2019’s electrifying “Her Smell,” “Deliver Me from Nowhere” does not evoke the herculean struggle of handling a tempestuous artist, not least because it can’t help but soften Springsteen’s tempestuous edges, as if afraid of offending its subject. On “Nebraska,” Springsteen got down to where his spirit met his bone, but “Deliver Me from Nowhere” doesn’t even get close.