State of the Union: Meet Me in a Land of Hope and Dreams

On record, Bruce Springsteen’s “Prove it All Night” was just a dude making a raw paean to the girl he loves. On the 1978 tour for the accompanying record, his introductory rap and stinging wind-up guitar solo turned it into a song of nigh religious fervor for the hard, endless work that goes into living. On the Reunion Tour of 1999-2000, it morphed again into a statement of forward-looking purpose: The E Street Band was back, and they were going to prove it all night. If reunion tours are typically cheap nostalgia, a craven payday, or lack of a better idea, this one felt different. Indeed, Springsteen closed most of those reunion shows with a new song, “Land of Hope and Dreams,” borrowing from Woody Guthrie and deploying the might of his backing band to imagine something like Walt Whitman’s America in the form of a heartland rocker. There was fear and uncertainty in the air at the turn of the century, and I always found it fascinating that Springsteen, no stranger to fatalism, shrugged off apocalyptic anxiety to envision utopia. I saw the last show of the Reunion Tour, July 1, 2000, with my friend Rory, and when we left Madison Square Garden that night, I almost felt like I could see it too.   

---------------

Content on his first few records to reconsecrate rock and roll and broader American myths, Springsteen transitioned on his next couple to sharply puncturing them. But it wasn’t until the 80s that his music became truly political even if his politics often still felt like work in progress. In a 1984 interview with Kurt Loder for Rolling Stone, Springsteen confessed to being a registered voter but not registered for one party or the other even if subsequent scattered thoughts on his belief system undoubtedly put him to the left. It reminds me of my own brief dalliance with being a registered independent, which was mere self-righteousness at staying out of the fray. But, of course, that’s where politics resides, like it or not, in the fray. And when President Reagan tried to co-opt Bruce’s masterpiece “Born in the U.S.A.” with his inane reading of it, Springsteen spoke up and hit back, and when Oliver North accomplice Fawn Hall asked the Boss if she and beau Rob Lowe could visit him backstage at a concert, he told her to take a hike. Innately, he knew the difference between right and wrong. 

Gradually, his politics became more precise and pronounced. He partnered with and made substantial donations to anti-hunger and veteran organizations. On his post-E Street Band acoustic record “Ghost of Tom Joad,” he dared to empathize with the plight of immigrants, nay, illegal immigrants. In 2006, Springsteen and his Seeger Sessions Band turned the fun, frivolous Late Night with Conan O’Brien into a platform to protest the endless war into which we were lied. In-between, at the end of the Reunion Tour, Springsteen debuted a new song, “American Skin (41 Shots)” culled from the real-life story of unarmed Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo being killed by four NYPD officers in early 1999. Even-handed and startlingly humane (and sadly, still as relevant in its righteous fury as ever), it also put him “at odds,” as the rock critic Steven Hyden would write, “with segments of his audience.” Like the Police Benevolent Association of the city of New York and Fraternal Order of Police, both of which excoriated the Boss in no uncertain terms. Still, each night for the 10-day NYC stand, Springsteen took the stage at MSG and played “American Skin.” (He also appeared in a 2021 Super Bowl spot for Jeep making a plea for America to meet in the middle that in its marriage of centrism and commercialism felt like the moving picture form of his podcast series with President Obama. Nobody’s perfect.)

 

In playing “American Skin,” Springsteen was content to let the music speak for itself. And maybe that’s the way it should be with music, with movies, with plays, with art, even if that art is going to be misinterpreted, whether by the head of the federal government, or a ballpark DJ on the 4th of July. But maybe, sometimes, in extreme cases, at extreme moments, letting the music speak for you just won’t do. And so, at a concert in Manchester, England in May of this year, Bruce Springsteen said this:

“Now, there’s some very weird, strange, and dangerous shit going on out there right now. In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now. In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now. In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain that they inflict on loyal American workers, they’re rolling back historic Civil Rights legislation that led to a more just and plural society, they’re abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They’re defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands. They’re removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.”

 

In the video, you can see Springsteen is not reading a teleprompter. He even begins by sitting on the edge of the stage, as if inviting the audience in closer. It underscores how he takes what has been transpiring personally. These are his words. And he says them with an exact cadence because he wants to get them just right because he understands their weight. But it’s more than just the exactness; it’s the repetition; it’s the phrase “this is happening now” repeated three times, the last one with great emphasis.

Present-day America is one that collectively decided over one million dead from COVID-19 wasn’t that bad and just moved on. Present-day America is one that collectively decided January 6th and a sitting President (and appreciable buffoon) seeking to overturn a free and fair election wasn’t that bad and voted him back into office. “I have this creeping feeling,” the esteemed Charles Pierce wrote last October when it was starting to become clear America was steering itself right into the iceberg, “that reality is no longer enough.” It feels as if we are on the other side of something, what, I don’t know. History will have to make sense of it. And because I won’t be here when that happens, I find it deeply important to take the time to impress upon myself the truth of what it feels like to be here right now. 

---------------

Springsteen’s monologue functioned as the intro to a performance of “My City of Ruins.” He originally wrote the gospel-influenced ballad in 2000 about the decay and decline of his adopted hometown of Asbury Park, New Jersey, imploring it to rise and rebuild. After 9/11, however, when he was called upon to open the America: Tribute to the Heroes telethon 10 days later, he played “My City of Ruins,” forever altering its meaning and linking it to New York and Washington and the deadliest terror attack in American history. By playing it here, now, and providing that foreword, he was effectively altering its meaning again. “Make no mistake about it,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote in the wake of September 11th with eerie prescience. “We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.”

That mysterious Enemy has morphed in the last 25 years. The President now calls it The Enemy Within, a phrase copped from Senator Joseph McCarthy during a dark period of American history that you might have thought this country wasn’t stupid enough to repeat. And that phrase was just a variation on the phrase Enemy of the people, one put to significant use by the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin. And Stalin instituted loyalty tests of government workers, transformed art and culture into an extension of his cult of personality, sicced troops on his own people, suppressed free speech and academic freedom, and rewrote history. That all sounds like what is happening in America right now. A day before an American ballerina was brought home from Russia after being falsely accused of high treason, the President accused former government officials of treason for not signing off on his lie that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen. My God, even George W. Bush defended the erstwhile Dixie Chicks’ right to speak their mind in 2003. When Springsteen spoke his, on the other hand, the current President offered a harebrained variation on that classic juvenile taunt If You Don’t Like It, You Can Leave and blustered about investigating him on some dubious charge extracted from the pudding where his brain should be. Springsteen answered by releasing an EP from his Manchester show including the speeches so everybody could hear. 

---------------  

All these reinventions of his own work underline what the esteemed Greil Marcus wrote about the Reunion Tour in 1999, noting that what set Springsteen apart from his peers was that “(he could) still fail.” In other words, Springsteen might have been frequently performing his greatest hits, but he and The E Street Band were not a greatest hits act. He was not checking songs off the setlist to satisfy fans so much as he was seeking an active connection with fans by making these songs live and breathe again, or to live and breathe in whole new way. Some were bound to fail measured against those that did not. “In a decade,” Marcus wrote, “the songs you cherish most today may be discredited by the person singing them.” And though Mr. Marcus and I probably disagreed on where Springsteen failed, and how often, I understand what he meant. “Born to Run” sung by a 50-year-old Springsteen, and a sixty-something Springsteen too (the last time I saw him live), discredits “Born to Run” sung by twenty-something Springsteen.

“Land of Hopes and Dreams,” on the other hand, was one only 50-year-old Springsteen could have sung. A song of such blunt optimism required his weathered voice, one that had endured hard times both personally and professionally, that had long since lost its innocence, paraphrasing the Boss himself, but maintained its idealism. And though it might stand to reason that the voice of 75-year-old Springsteen looking back at the last quarter-century of American life between his Reunion Tour and now, some steps up, so many steps back, would discredit it, as his Manchester performance of the song goes to show, it doesn’t. Granted, this is a different version than 25 years ago. Max Weinberg’s beat isn’t quite as big, less heartland rock, more rock and roll spiritual, inviting additional horns and voices and interpolating Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready” at the end in a way that feels profound. In fact, Springsteen contradicts his own opening lyric, “Grab your ticket” giving way to “You don’t need no ticket,” as if imagining a future where his mythical train will melt all borders. And he still makes you believe that once this storm passes, the land of hope and dreams will be waiting at the end of the long, long arc of moral justice.

Sweet Home Chicago

Like any kid growing up in the late 80s, ABC’s TGIF anchor “Perfect Strangers” was appointment television. It was filmed in Burbank, but it was set in Chicago, just as “Friends” was filmed in Burbank but set in New York. The latter’s establishing shots skewed conventional, but I enjoyed them, especially when it would start wide and then zoom in on its Greenwich Village apartment building exterior. I liked imagining it that way, all these friends and their antics occurring amid so much NYC hustle and bustle just as I liked imagining unlikely cousins Larry Appleton and Balki Bartokomous getting up to their ample hijinks in real live Chicago. Indeed, the “Perfect Strangers” opening credit sequence employed actual Windy City locations, like Larry buying a newspaper (buying a what?) on Washington Street just outside the Cultural Center, and both he and Balki exiting the Red Line underground station on State Street across from the Chicago Theatre. When I moved to Chicago and eventually found a job, it was on Michigan Avenue, right around the corner from the Cultural Center, and on mornings when the Brown Line was moving slow and I’d change to the Red, if I remembered, and even though it made little sense because it was on the wrong side of the street for where I needed to get, I would use the same exit as Larry and Balki, imagining myself tuxedoed as I did. Here I was, that same clueless kid watching “Perfect Strangers” all those years ago, in Chicago, standing tall on the wings of my dreams. 

I moved to Chicago 20 years ago this June, a few years after retreating to Iowa when my Phoenix move didn’t take but still knowing I wanted life in a big city. I had a couple friends in Chicago who offered to let me sleep on their (broken) couch while I got myself settled in the couple months before a three-bedroom apartment would become available atop their current place. I arrived on a Saturday afternoon and strolled right into the backyard where my pals and a host of others that would also become my pals were drinking beer and playing Bocce Ball. Looking back on it, I was essentially walking right into a new community. I lived for a long time in a classic Chicago three-flat where everybody knew each other, a co-star in my own “Perfect Strangers”-ish sitcom, just one with a wood-paneled old man bar down the alley. I watched the 2006 NFC Championship Game there when the Bears made the Super Bowl, eating the cocktail wieners from a crockpot provided by a regular, listening to The Blue Brothers’ “Sweet Home Chicago” when another regular played it on the jukebox at game’s end. It was snowing outside and despite the dim lighting inside, the whole place seemed to glow like Valhalla. I remember thinking something like, “If ten-year-old Nick watching a Bears game in the basement could see me now.”  

Almost instantly, I knew moving here had been the right choice. That only made it more ironic when at the end of 2005, my health nosedived. It was strange, being so emotionally happy but so physically miserable, and though 2006 was one of the worst years of my life, I survived it because it was also one of the best. And once I got my health under control in the twenty-tens, that’s when all the pieces of me finally began to coalesce and settle into place in a way that I didn’t even realize was possible until it happened. That correlated to meeting My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, the two best decisions I have made in a life that has been jam-packed with dumb ones dovetailing. In 2012, when Tift Merritt, one of my favorite singer-songwriters, was promoting her album “Traveling Alone,” she told NPR that she had to realize you don’t just arrive in a place where things make sense; “you have to build that place for yourself.” And though I think she’s right, I also know that I might never have built my own place if I didn’t come to Chicago. 

Sydney’s first apartment in Chicago on The Bear that may or may not have also been my first apartment in Chicago.

When I originally moved here, I really only had one goal, and it wasn’t to find a job, though I grudgingly did, but to see as much live music as possible. After all, I came from a middling music scene to one of the best in the world, as evinced by the Chicago Reader concert lists I would pore over each week. Boy, did I. For my first few years in Chicago, I was seeing a show once a month, and some months I was seeing two or three. Though this might have exacerbated my seeming hearing loss, I have no regrets. It was a glorious time. I saw so many singer/songwriters and bands I had longed to see, like Tift Merritt, as a matter of fact, and Kathleen Edwards, and Rilo Kiley, and I saw so many more that I did not even know until I saw them, like Adrienne Young, and The Avett Brothers (who were opening for someone else), and Ra Ra Riot, back in the aughts when onstage they were an explosion of youthful joy until they got older, alas, and became something calmer and comfortable (and boring). As Lisa Bonet wistfully observed in the Chicago movie classic “High Fidelity,” “Ah, and so it is.”

The first show I saw as a Chicagoan was the blues and roots-inflected rocker Shannon McNally at Schubas Tavern, a place I would come to know as well as the Music Box Theatre or the Landmark Century Cinema. Back then, Schubas got all the shows that Lincoln Hall or Thalia Hall would get now, and Schubas was only a couple train stops away. It was only some years later that I realized McNally had cut a live album of that concert called “North American Ghost Music.”

 

Well, there you go. That’s Shannon McNally, alright, standing in the middle of the empty Schubas floor. That table up there along the right wall in front of the stage is where I posted up with my friend Daryl right in front of the dude playing pedal steel. McNally appears to be wearing the bootcut jeans that my mind remembered her wearing, because those were trendy in those days, and then weren’t, and now are again, and I have lived here long enough to see that glittering view of the Chicago skyline from the Brown Line when it curves around from North Avenue toward Sedgwick become obscured by tree growth in the spring and summer, and the wood-paneled old man bar rehabbed into a cooler young person’s bar (and it’s always been burning since the world’s been turning). And that song, “Pale Moon,” that’s the one I remember most, the sort of live music moment where all of a sudden you seem to ineffably leave your body. I have seen so many great shows in Chicago, and I saw more shows in that three-year span of 2005-07 then I think I can even remember, and even the ones I do remember, well, they’re gone, ephemeral, as is generally intended with live music. But what a fortunate cosmic coincidence to have my inaugural show in the city that changed my life documented for the historical record.

Just Another List

The New York Times counted down the 25 Best Films of the 21st Century (uh, so far) in 2017 and this week has been counting down the 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century (uh, so far) again. Counting them down after a neat block of time like a quarter-century feels more appropriate, less arbitrary, though I wonder, isn’t an arbitrary timeframe more appropriate for the arbitrary nature of a list? I mean, what interests me here is not the NYT’s composite list; that’s just fodder for all the people helpfully reminding us that lists are meaningless to complain about what the meaningless list got wrong. No, I’m interested in the individual ballots, fascinating snapshots of who Elizabeth Banks, and Mel Brooks are. (I especially liked the run from Nicholas Sparks to Tramell Tillman to John Turturro to John Waters, veering all over the place.) Lists are feelings, not facts, and impermanent, gone in the space of a single cup of espresso which is how long it took me to make my reader-submitted ballot via the NYT website. Once I was finished, I was already like, wait, I forgot stuff! But did I? I like being compelled to periodically compile such lists because it reminds me how my tastes have changed, and how they have stayed the same, and how my opinions on certain movies have altered, or strengthened. If I make it to the next NYT list in 2033, how might it look then? Who knows? Certainly not me. I can’t wait! Don’t like mine? Of course you don’t! Go to the NYT site and make your own!

My Favorite Beach Boys Needle Drops

Brian Wilson died in his sleep on June 11, 2025 at the age of 82. With him, The Beach Boys died too. I mean, yes, The Beach Boys are still active, technically, under the stewardship of Mike Love, but in spirit, they are gone. And though I have a soft spot for “Cocktail” (1988), not as a guilty pleasure but as something like a bizarrely fascinating artistic bomb, it’s always been unfortunate that it might be the preeminent movie associated with The Beach Boys. That’s courtesy of “Kokomo,” the #1 hit about a fictional tropical island created and written and recorded sans Brian Wilson. A perfect “Cocktail” song, undoubtedly, but also nowhere near the apex of Beach Boys songs in movies. (Unless you want to argue, as the invaluable culture writer Molly Lambert convincingly has, its “poisoned wholesomeness” makes it the key to unlocking “Cocktail” in the first place.) No, when it comes to The Beach Boys in movies, these are the needle drops that spring to mind.

(Note: for reasons of fair play, the 2014 Brian Wilson biopic “Love & Mercy” is not eligible for this list.) 

My Favorite Beach Boys Needle Drops

Don’t Worry Baby in Never Been Kissed (1999). “Really,” readers all over the interweb are saying, “‘Never Been Kissed?’” Yes, really. Because even if “Never Been Kissed” is harmless, well, it’s also nothing special, or even close to it. But that’s the thing, cuing up my personal favorite Beach Boys tune can briefly elevate the climax of even the most middling rom com. 

Ol’ Man River in Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). This song appears near the end of Wes Anderson’s animated opus, and it’s a happy ending. But even happy endings are, in a way, melancholic, as the sequence scored to this Beach Boys version of the 1927 Kern and Hammerstein show tune goes to show, demonstrating how life in all its banalities and difficulties, even for foxes and an opossum, just keeps rolling along.

Feel Flows in Almost Famous (2000). This is a Carl Wilson Beach Boys track start to finish that Brian only sang backup on, but still, it’s too memorable to leave off this list. I wasn’t familiar with this song until “Almost Famous,” in fact, and, honestly, to this day I can’t even say I know what it’s about which works in its favor. After all, Cameron Crowe places it over the moment backstage at the concert where the young scribe William Miller (Patrick Fugit) has ended up and the groupie, nay, band-aid Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) who in the previous sequence had promised to get him a backstage pass shows up, sure enough, with that backstage pass in tow whether or not he still needs it. It’s a moment, frankly, for all the dweebies like William and me – the cool girl remembers us! You can’t put that feeling into words, not ones that make any real sense, just a Beach Boys melody and vocal. Indeed, in some ineffable manner, the way Kate Hudson says, “The truth just sounds different,” she manages to harmonize with the song itself. 

Wouldn’t It Be Nice? in Roger & Me (1989). This song has been used so many times and in so many movies, from the Nixon Era classic “Shampoo” up through “Sonic the Hedgehog 3,” apparently, and many points in-between, even on TV, including one of my 122 favorite “Seinfeld” episodes. Michael Moore utilized the lead track of “Pet Sounds” as an effective counterpoint to a montage of the ruins of Flint, Michigan, though I liked the monologue lead-in to this montage even more. It’s a former autoworker explaining that as he suffered a panic attack in his car after being laid off for the fifth time in five years, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” came on the radio, an irony so cruel it could make you believe in Providence to a certainty or not believe in Providence at all. 

Wouldn’t It Be Nice? in One Crazy Summer (1986). A song about wishing you could grow up already scoring one of the recurring bits in Savage Steve Holland’s off the wall comedy in which Joel Murray’s George Calamari is buried in the sand becomes a reminder to be careful what you wish. Buried in sand? Ha! Someday, George, you’re gonna grow up and be buried in life’s menial tasks! 

All Summer Long in American Graffiti (1973). In the wake of Wilson’s death, Bruce Springsteen said his single greatest car song “Racing in the Street” wouldn’t have existed without The Beach Boys, and “Racing in the Street” and “American Graffiti” go hand in hand, and when you need to summarize a movie via the closing credits in which cars and music are integral, well, who else are you gonna call? And that “All Summer Long,” as so many Neil deGrasse Tyson -types have pointed out over the years, was released two years after “American Graffiti” is set, hey, that only works to remind us that some pop songs are eternal.

God Only Knows in Boogie Nights (1997). The majestically sprawling “Boogie Nights” was one helluva hard movie to tie together come closing time and, yet, by employing what is frequently considered Wilson’s magnum opus, those astonishing vocal rounds seeming to stand in for the film’s own infinite layers, Paul Thomas Anderson did it.

I Get Around in Three Kings (1999). The only diegetic deployment of The Beach Boys on this list, marked in the cassette tape we see in the armored vehicle of four American soldiers cum treasure hunters, “I Get Around” provides a nifty counterpoint to the endless swath of desert through which they race, California Dreaming on such a Middle East day. It’s made all the more potent by how director David O. Russell and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel use long shots to make it seem as if they are surfing in the sand. 

The Valuable Lessons of Spaceballs

The golden age of movie parodies seemed to run out of steam in the mid-90s as irony became ascendant. If “The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult” was not the spiritual nadir in 1994 then maybe it was Mel Brooks’s “Dracula: Dead and Loving It” in 1995, such a critical and commercial bomb that Brooks never directed again. (Perhaps not so curiously, he entirely elides this subject in the chapter on the movie in his memoir “All About Me!”) And yet, a not half-bad looking “Naked Gun” reboot starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson will be released on August 1st and as was recently announced, Mel Brooks’s “Star Wars” spoof “Spaceballs” is getting a sequel, tentatively slated for release in 2027, forty years after the original. Variety reports that “Spaceballs 2” comes with an accompanying logline deeming the movie “A Non-Prequel Non-Reboot Sequel Part Two but with Reboot Elements Franchise Expansion Film.” Reports abound of the death of irony, and that sounds like a death of irony joke, and so maybe Brooksian parody is due for a comeback?

The interweb rejoiced at this announcement, and why wouldn’t it, starved for some good news. I rejoiced too. I was not nine going on ten when “Spaceballs” was released and obsessed with “Star Wars” (and college football) and little else and so of course I loved it. What’s interesting, though, is that contemporary reviews of “Spaceballs” were rather mixed, pegging it as outmoded (with “Return of the Jedi” four years in the review mirror) and scattershot in its comedy. And it’s true, as I came to realize, that despite Brooks’s typical Borsch Belt commitment, “Spaceballs” never achieves the dizzying ludicrous speed, ironically, of “The Producers” or “Blazing Saddles.” But it’s also true that the funniest bits of “Spaceballs” have stayed with me longer. It’s a parody, yes, but upon further review, in places it’s a true satire, skewering the industry and the world in profound ways, teaching lessons that all these years later still resonate.

The Valuable Lessons of Spaceballs 

Lesson One. If Brooks was not necessarily prescient for this joke in 1987, since you could already see the industry trending toward its sequel obsession with “Beverly Hills Cop II,” “Teen Wolf Too,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3,” “Superman IV,” and “Jaws: The Revenge,” well, still, to this day, no joke satirizing shameless cinematic cash grabs has topped it. In a way, “The Matrix Resurrections” already was “Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money.” And if the real “Spaceballs 2” is the 98-year-old Brooks seeing through that punchline before the end, what a way to go out. 

Lesson Two. If “Spaceballs” did not predict social media itself, it innately predicted the pervasive feeling of social media. 

Lesson Three. By infusing “Spaceballs” with fake “Spaceballs” stuffs, like “Spaceballs” the Breakfast Cereal, and “Spaceballs” the Lunch Box, and “Spaceballs” the Shaving Cream, Brooks was making it so you couldn’t quite tell where the movie ended and the merchandising began, as if the former were merely a vehicle for the latter, taking a “Spaceballs” the Flamethrower to the pesky line between film and product.

Lesson Four. Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” was released in December 1987, six months after “Spaceballs” was released and which in its own way had already explained the 80s mantra that greed was good, thank you very much.

Lesson Five. This one is more for me than you. But. As mentioned above, college football has always been my other passion along with movies and to this day, when a college football gets not just good but crazy, I do not define it as good and crazy but as having Gone to Plaid. 

Lesson Six. It’s possible there has never been a better movie joke than the meta sequence in which the bad guys procure a copy of the home video cassette of the movie they are literally in to fast-forward to the point of the movie where they currently are to try and determine the whereabouts of the good guys, finding themselves watching their scene. (“When does this happen in the movie?!” “Now. You’re looking at now.”) It was a send-up of the nascent home video culture of the 80s, yes, but with deeper layers baked in. Not just the joke about instant cassettes being out in stores before the movie is even finished, suggesting a world where selling the movie is more vital than making the movie, but portending our frightening future where an obsession with documenting and presenting our lives has caused the notion of being in the moment to be twisted into something else entirely. Indeed, Rick Moranis’s villain Dark Helmet being in the moment but not able to quite recognize or accept that he’s in the moment is nothing less than a kind of comic Buddhism. The most existential images in cinema are Monica Vitti staring into the void in any Antonioni joint and Rick Moranis staring into the camera in “Spaceballs.”

Lesson Seven. I think of this line and line reading all the time. All the time.

Some Drivel On...the Deliver Me From Nowhere Trailer

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.

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.

Summer of 69

When high school senior Abby (Sam Morelos) discovers the boy for whom she pines prefers a specific position when it comes to physical amorousness (see: the title of the movie), she enlists an adult dancer named Santa Monica (Chole Fineman) as mentor. Abby promises to pay an exorbitant fee, which Santa Monica plans to use to buy the club where she works and therefore have something to brag about at her dreaded upcoming high school reunion, though you can likely discern whether Abby really has the money. All this would be enough to ensure “Summer of 69” is not screened at any Pope Leo XIV-themed Catholic church lock-ins, but even worse, Jillian Bell’s directorial debut is also sex positive and even worse than that, treats Santa Monica’s occupation with some respect. Perhaps the single best sequence is when Abby first glimpses her future tutor at work, marveling at how comfortable she is in her own body, the camera boxing out all the leering dudes and turning it into an empowering moment just between the two of them.

I don’t mean to overstate the case. “Summer of 69” delivers on the raunchy kind of comedy it promises. Not just in one-liners but in how Bell visually conveys jokes, like an early reveal of the club’s owner played by an on-point Paula Pell. (One complaint: there could have been more Paula Pell.) It is at its absolute best, though, when tying humor to its earnestness, both in the chemistry between Morelos and Fineman and in several sequences evincing Abby’s tendency to retreat to fantasy as a coping mechanism as she does during an imaginary haunted house non-reverie bringing to life her unfounded shame for the task she’s undertaking. When Abby pinches herself at one point to ensure she remains in the moment, it’s genuinely moving. Morelos and Fineman are so affecting together, in fact, that when the requisite narrative downturn moves them apart, the momentum demonstrably lags (even if the high school reunion scene works better than you think). That causes “Summer of 69” to feel overly long in the homestretch and at least in part blunt the impact of its conclusion even if it rebounds with a closing line that put a big smile on my face.