One Battle After Another

“One Battle After Another” has frequently been described as writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s first action movie, and that proves true in more ways than one. It is an action movie in the genre sense, packed with car chases and cartoon-like stunts, even a Tom Cruise name-drop, while being propelled with such a dynamic camera and kinetic pace that its two-hours-and-fifty-minutes seem to last an hour, tops, a movie as one virtual headlong rush. But this breakneck tempo also innately feeds into “One Battle After Another’s” larger idea as a movie about the desperation, folly, necessity, recklessness, hopelessness, and hope of taking action. “If it does not seem that those words should be strung together,” Roger Ebert once wrote of another instant classic, “perhaps that is because movies do not very often reflect the full range of human life.”

The opening sequence does not so much draw back a curtain on characters and events as remove a blindfold from our eyes after a long car ride to parts unknown and plunging us directly into an operation of the far-left revolutionary group known as the French 75. That was Rick Blaine’s drink in “Casablanca” as he often found himself in a grey are while weighing whether to remain neutral or get involved and a grey area is where “One Battle After Another” often finds itself too. Like the no holds barred beginning in which Anderson effectively, if not dangerously, animates not only the anarchic but kinky thrill of such fanaticism as the French 75 liberates a detention camp and sets off bombs built by the so-called Rocketman, Pat Calhoun (Leonard DiCaprio), who is in love with fellow extremist Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). There’s a recurring joke about Pat’s failure to study the rebellion text, and though that might sound like Anderson isn’t taking their mission seriously, it’s more an evocation so many similar far-left groups and their sensationalist, sincere, sometimes incomprehensible motivations. We never hear the French 75 read their manifesto because this opening is the manifesto.

This revolutionary idyll is compromised, however, when Perfidia kills a security guard during a bank robbery and learns she’s pregnant. Pat wants to put their baby first, but Anderson suggests that the amount of skin in the game is different based on skin color. Perfidia is shown to hail from a line of Black revolutionaries, and to her, the cause supersedes any one person, even her own child. The thorniness of this decision underlines the multi-layered nature of Anderson’s screenplay, as intricate in its ideas as it is obvious. Look no further than Perfidia’s name, Latin for betrayal, foreshadowing how after committing murder, she names names and enters witness protection, never to be seen again, the deliberate sidelining of Taylor’s explosive presence mirroring the French 75’s implosion as Pat goes underground with their daughter, Charlene. That child, however, is not his. 

Enter: Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), overseeing the detention camp the French 75 liberates as the movie opens, who becomes tormented by and obsessed with Perfidia after she paradoxically deadens his sense of power by asking him in no uncertain terms to get it up and parading him around in just that manner. He gets the last word by extorting her for sex, and then forcing her to become a proverbial rat, only for her to vindictively ghost him while leaving Charlene behind. The child becomes paramount when Lockjaw is invited to join a white-only secret society whose name, The Christmas Adventurers Club, sardonically equates the War on Christmas with Gen. Jack D. Ripper’s battle to maintain purity of essence in “Dr. Strangelove.” (Their salutation of “Hail Saint Nick” sounds like the password at M*gyn K*lly’s Christmas party.) They explain to Lockjaw their belief of being the supreme race and therefore supreme beings and as they do, Penn does the most incredible thing with his face, as if the Colonel’s life flashes before his eyes, craving an honor he knows he does not deserve given the ostensible impurity of his precious bodily fluids. To ensure his qualifications for the club, he enlists a division of the armed forces for a search and destroy mission of his biracial heir. 

Time is nebulous in “One Battle After Another.” Based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, about a 70s revolutionary withering in the 80s, Anderson sets his movie in something approximating the present but never comes out and says it; I only realized it was a modern setting upon noticing someone taking a selfie. This can make the French 75 feel out of place, 70s counterculture oddly transplanted to the 21st century, but in this muddling of eras, Anderson inherently suggests both the perpetual futility in fighting the machine and the eternal need for it. That duality comes across in Pat, rechristened Bob Ferguson after he goes underground in the small California town of Baktan Cross with Charlene, rechristened Willa (Chase Infiniti). At one point, he is shown smoking dope and watching “The Battle of Algiers” on the couch, which is as uproariously pitiful as it is on the nose. Costumed to look less like Leo than Kevin Corrigan, DiCaprio fully inhabits the incongruous blend of both the perpetually baked protagonist of “The Big Lebowski” (Jeff Bridges) and that same movie’s reactionary Malibu police chief (Leon Russom), a spent counterculturist confronting modern political correctness, but never forgetting to let an almost fervent protective love for Willa seep through, a deft feat of zaniness and earnestness.

Under the guise of a drug and immigrant operation, Lockjaw and his men invade Baktan Cross, and when Bob and Willa become separated, the listless father is finally forced up and off the couch (though not necessarily out of his bathrobe) to re-enlist, in manner of speaking. He is aided in his rescue mission by his daughter’s sensei, Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), who in effect becomes Bob’s sensei, too. Even in a movie chock full of exemplary turns, del Toro’s is especially exquisite, echoing the movie’s wavelength by infusing philosophical lines with as much genuine humor as real weight (“Courage, Bob”), though he doesn’t even require dialogue to make an impression, embodying the whole person in his air, a cool, encouraging, patient countenance that is not just an impeccable juxtaposition to Bob’s manic air but an expression of someone leading by example. In these sequences, “One Battle After Another” essentially leads by example too. Baktan Cross, it turns out, is not merely a sanctuary for ex-radicals but also for Mexican immigrants, which Anderson intrinsically lays out side-by-side with Sergio fostering Bob’s escape, a community as an act of resistance itself, and one that might just be more effective than the French 75’s more lethal tactics. 

As Willa, Infiniti evinces both the singular impulsive honesty of a teenager but also a preciousness identifying her as a chip off her mother’s block. Indeed, Bob might be coming to her rescue, but ultimately, she rescues herself, putting into perspective how Anderson yokes Willa’s dawning political awareness to the age-old idea of a parent having to make peace with letting their child go. And if she has both Perfidia and Bob in her, she also carries the tutelage of Sergio, and the biology of her natural father, too, a complicated personification of an impossibly complicated country, one that is always so close to its potential and yet always so far away from it. And that’s why against all odds, “One Battle After Another” earns its concluding needle drop, a father passing the torch to his daughter, sending Willa out the door and on her way, gearing up for the next battle in the endless struggle. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Eye of God (1997)

“Eye of God” was based on writer/director Tim Blake Nelson’s stage play of the same name, and it feels like it. I kept thinking it was a movie where the writing mattered more than the direction. And though I might have liked to see Nelson visualize information a little bit more, he is, nonetheless, up to something here, indulging in an understated style with a point. This 1997 crime drama, one that doesn’t seem to have been in theaters long, and that I somehow never rented despite it being released back in those days when I rented almost everything, but currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, is one of my favorite kinds of movies. Like, say, “Cold Weather,” or “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Eye of God” does not lock into place until the last shot. 

The almighty U.S. Economy might have been strong in 1997, but it doesn’t seem to have shown up in little Kingfisher, Oklahoma, the kind of place where people only stop for a burger on their way to somewhere else. The local burger joint is where Ainsley Dupree (Martha Plimpton) works and this sensation of being nowhere explains why she might strike up a pen pal relationship with an inmate, Jack (Kevin Anderson), evasive on what put him behind bars and just released as the movie opens. Ainsley sports a glass eye, unnecessary symbolism for her lack of vision given that Plimpton so quietly lives and breathes it, not mere innocence but willful self-deception. And the way she has her character acknowledge that self-deception with a romantic smile on her face genuinely aches.

Jack has been reborn in prison as a fundamentalist, and yet for all her sunniness, Ainsley is not one for God, owing to a hardscrabble past, a dad who died young. These notions of religious questioning are embedded in “Eye of God’s” other storyline, one involving Sheriff Rogers (Hal Holbrook) who struggles with his own uncertainty of faith, doubting whether God is really up there and watching over us, all of which is put to the test when he finds 14-year-old Tom Spencer (Nick Stahl) wandering down the middle of the road one night covered in blood. 

It eventually becomes clear that Tom wandering down the road in blood is not the beginning of this story but the end. That non-linear approach is not merely utilized to dress up the obvious, however, but to infuse a sense of inexorability rather than suspense. Indeed, Nelson’s aesthetic is wholly restrained to a point of near frustration until you realize it’s his overriding strategy. Even the single most terrifying moment, when Jack snaps and puts his hands to Ainsley’s throat, is recounted in a shot from the side that feels eerily free of judgement and evocative of the detached tone that Nelson favors to imbue a sense of God’s absence, or maybe just indifference. In the concluding shot, though, he answers that question with one shift of the camera, so simple yet so profound that it took my breath away. 

The Woman in Cabin 10

Looking for an easy assignment after a traumatic one, Guardian journalist Laura Blacklock (Keira Knightley), “Lo” for short, jumps at the chance to hitch a ride aboard billionaire Richard Bullmer’s (Guy Pearce) superyacht to interview his terminally ill wife Anne (Lisa Loven Kongsli) about what she intends as a posthumous foundation. It doesn’t take long for things to go wrong, however, and not just because Lo’s ex-boyfriend Ben (David Ajala) is also aboard. No, on her first night she witnesses a person thrown overboard, believing it to be the young woman she briefly met earlier, the one in Cabin 10. After alerting the crew, however, they conduct a search and explain that not only are all passengers and crew accounted for, but Cabin 10 had no occupant in the first place. Given not just the situation but the setting, “The Woman in Cabin 10” seems set up for a stylish murder mystery in which Lo turns sleuth to interview a gallery of intriguing suspects from a rock star (Paul Kaye) to a gallerist (a gloriously icy Hannah Waddingham) to Buller himself. Knightley is certainly game for such a mystery, anyway. When Lo is told everything checks out, time to keep going, chop-chop, director Simon Stone opts for a comic long shot as Knightley’s face quizzically droops, conveying, “Like, wait, what?”

But that mystery never truly materializes. It’s not just that the secret is given away earlier than you might expect, but that “The Woman in Cabin 10” never makes any real attempt to cover the fact that Bullmer is up to no good, underscored in Pearce’s supercilious performance, slurping up orange juice at the breakfast buffet like Shooter McGavin eats pieces of shit for breakfast. Stone, who co-wrote the script with two others, see this less as a mystery than a nightmare, kind of “Gaslight” on a superyacht in which a middle-class journalist slips into psychosis as the rich and famous continually tell her not to believe her lying eyes. Stone, though, doesn’t just see “The Woman in Cabin 10” as a nightmare but, crucially, as trash; it’s set almost entirely on a boat, but like Lt. Frank Drebin, the movie itself is swimming in raw sewage. Stone embodies the unrepentant shamelessness of the rich by throwing all sense of shame to the wind, evoking the haughty belittling of Lo in the over-the-top comical tones, essentially rendering the superyacht as nothing less than an opulent apparatus for covering up a crime, and amplifying Lo’s nigh hallucinatory state through all manner of wide-angle lenses. Indeed, even if many frames remained marred by that artificial Netflix sheen, especially the interiors, Stone’s shot-making is better than you might suspect. One image right after Lo’s concerns have been blithely written off shows her standing at the edge of the yacht, the wide angle disappearing the boat altogether, making it seem for all the world that she has been set adrift with the truth.

Materialists

In telling the story of a matchmaker, Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson), torn between two suitors, the wealthy financier Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal), and the poor actor with a catering gig on the side, John Pitts (Chris Evans), writer/director Celine Song wants to create a modern update on the class-conscious romantic comedies of the 1930s and 40s. And fair enough. Save for a few ham-fisted attempts at humor involving John’s roommate situation, however, “Materialists” isn’t really funny, or even trying to be funny, or even trying to be arch, as the set-up might have suggested. No, Song takes her ideas seriously, which isn’t a bad thing, and sometimes proves quite good, though her notions of the present-day economic divide in America can’t help but come across glib. At one point, Lucy confesses her salary to be $80k before taxes and, well, renting a Brooklyn apartment all to herself, not to mention maintaining that haircut and wardrobe week-in and week-out, on that salary might honestly be the funniest thing in the whole unfunny movie. 

Lucy’s matchmaker profession instantly evokes romance as a business. Indeed, she meets Harry, and re-encounters John, at a wedding for a client. Harry overhears her mid-business pitch, and when he tries to ask her out on a date, she comes across more interested in signing him up as a client, eventually relenting to a relationship in the face of his charm offensive. Even so, every conversation they have is born less of sweet nothings than practicalities, what each person offers the other, etc., as if they are dealmakers hashing out details, underlined in how Song tends to shoot these scenes in two shots that render so many swanky locales as boardrooms. Even Lucy’s discussions with John, trying to win her heart all over again, involve the details of real life, his lack of material world usefulness. These scenes are fascinating, and in them, the dialogue assumes a captivating kind of hyper-formality, one that impeccably meshes with Johnson’s oft-impassive acting style.

At times, Song appears to be attempting to deconstruct the rom com itself, like she watched “Hitch” one night and wanted to pick apart its rigidly structured sentimentality like a frog. Yet, in the end she becomes as reliant on formula as any regular old rom com. She might tack on a sexual assault subplot involving one of Lucy’s clients (Louisa Jacobson), and though she at least lets the victim have the final word, the whole thing still chiefly and insultingly exists to spur Lucy toward her own self-realization. What’s more, Song never really sees any of this trio as real people; they hardly exist outside the notion of their swirling relationships. The closest we get is a brief snippet of John acting in a play, but even then, we learn next to nothing about what drew him to the stage in the first place. Who they are beyond their socioeconomic status is irrelevant. That might not have been so bad had Song followed the transactional nature of relationships to the end, but ultimately, she wants the characters to overcome it, which is hard to do when they aren’t really characters at all but mere stand-ins.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Out of Sight (1998)

In discussing “Jenny From the Block” for his 60 Songs explaining the 2000s podcast, host Rob Harvilla mentioned Jennifer Lopez’s, shall we say, less than forceful voice and its myriad detractors, including her diva rival, Mariah Carey. And the thing is, they’re both right, Harvilla and Mariah. After the episode, I listened to my personal favorite JLo track “Ain’t It Funny” and it’s true, Lopez’s voice is thin, holding up its end of the bargain and not much more. Ah, but voices are strange, fickle things, aren’t they, and where, say, a voice might shoot the lights out on a song like “Emotions” that same voice might barely rise to the occasion in a movie like “Glitter,” or like “The Christmas Melody,” God help us, just as a voice that might get swept away by a gust of wind on “Ain’t It Funny” can turn around and be so kinetic in something like “Out of Sight.”

Lopez is Karen Sisco, a U.S. Federal Marshal, who winds up locked in the trunk of her own car at Glades Correctional Institution in south Florida with bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) after he escapes with the help of his friend, the aptly named Buddy (Ving Rhames). It’s a meet cute by trunk light, and one shrewdly designed to put Karen and Jack in as close physical proximity as possible before moving them apart, tantalizing us as much as they tantalize each other, occasionally giving us glimpses of their chemistry, like him waving at her from across a hotel lobby, just for a second, so you can practically feel the static electricity in the air. Scott Frank’s screenplay, adapted from Elmore Leonard’s 1996 novel of the same name, might have a jigsaw design, but interestingly, it’s not trying to gin up surprise. Instead, it uses its mismatched time frames to illuminate backstory without having to resort to exposition while also enhancing the romantic tension to nigh unbelievable levels.

Yet, even if “Out of Sight” effectively maximizes its stars, it just as effectively builds out the world around them with a gallery of well-crafted and well-played supporting characters. As the chief heavy, Don Cheadle nimbly plays both halves of his alternating nicknames, Mad Dog and Snoopy, to be feared and not as big as his britches, while Steve Zahn as bungling thief Glenn Michaels invites improbable empathy while demonstrating so much comic haplessness in concocting the climactic heist of a wealthy tycoon (Albert Brooks) in Detroit. And though Lopez and Clooney share magnificent chemistry, they each have equally magnificent chemistry with, respectively, Dennis Farina as Karen’s dad and Rhames as Buddy, both actors help illuminating so much backstory and texture in just their airs. (Rhames has a fantastic bit of body language in the way he just munches on pieces a candy bar, delighting in the small pleasures of the incarcerated.)

Still, for all the fine supporting turns, “Out of Sight” remains the Lopez and Clooney show, building to a showstopping scene in a Detroit hotel bar where they finally meet again. Building off a jokey observation from the trunk, Jack wondering what might happen if they met under different circumstances and he offered to buy her a drink, this scene feels like fantasy. A fantasy to them, yes, but also to us, illustrating the silver screen’s ability to let us indulge the fantastical. The snow falling outside the window virtually literalizes the snow globe effect, the two embracing their chaotic “relationship,” and when they return to her room, Soderbergh briefly trades out the chillier hues of his Motor City scenes re-infuses the images with the warm colors of the Florida scenes. It doesn’t last, though, as “Out of Sight” punctures the fantasy in a conclusion that emotionally counts. 

Maybe because of how Soderbergh emerged through Sundance, we tend to think of him as an independent filmmaker, outside the mainstream, but in “Out of Sight” he also tapped his unlikely gift as a movie star whisperer. He helped Clooney ditch his head down-eyes up acting style, and the hair and makeup people helped him go away from the Caesar cut, unlocking his inner-movie star in a way the previous summer’s “Batman and Robin” could not. From the marvelously crafted opening scene, a gentlemanly bank robbery, he belongs on the big screen in a way he theretofore had not. In fact, Joe Chrest and Wayne Pere, playing ad guys who haplessly hit on Karen in the hotel bar before Jack appears, become a useful juxtaposition between posers and real thing, between showing off and self-confidence.

Retroactive 1998 Costume Design / Hairstyling of the Year: bangs, turtleneck, and popped black leather jacket collar that frame Jennifer Lopez’s face like the Movie Star she is.

Clooney’s self-confidence manifests as relaxation, presaging his roles in the “Ocean’s” movies, but Lopez’s onscreen self-confidence manifests as a rock-solid physical presence in scenes where her character is in peril and in others, as a quiet inner strength. Even when it’s clear that Karen is smitten with this handsome bank robber, Lopez never tamps down those traits. Both Lopez and the movie are conscious, after all, that Karen is a woman in a man’s world, managing an overprotective father, suffering a condescending superior, fending off so many blowhards, like those ad guys. Another movie might have had Jack tell them off, but Karen handles them herself, first politely, then with no uncertain exasperation. “Beat it, Andy,” she says, finally, and emphatically, though without Lopez raising her voice, her breathiness like a bass drum, a line reading as cutting as it is comical. Mariah couldn’t have said it that way.

Sacramento

“Sacramento” begins in Los Angeles where dad-to-be Glenn (Michael Cera) puts the finishing touches on what will be his first child’s crib. Overcome with anxiety, he decides the crib isn’t sturdy enough, rips it apart, and dumps the splintered remains outside. He’s not ready to be a dad, in other words, and which his wife Rosie (Kristen Stewart) knows, encouraging him not just to go hang out with his rash friend Rickey (Michael Angarano), who first appears hiding in a tree outside their home, seeking an element of surprise in his saying hello, but to take a spur of the moment road trip with him to California’s capital city to help him grieve by spreading his father’s ashes. After all, a road trip is the only cure for such male blues, a rather conventional hook belying a rather conventional arc that Angarano, who directed, still evinces with enough flair and wit to render it enjoyable. 

In Rickey’s air, it is as obvious to the audience as it is to Glenn that this trip really isn’t about his father’s ashes, and thankfully Angarano, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Chris Smith, doesn’t endeavor to conceal this truth too long. When the director reveals this truth to the audience, it’s through a slapstick scene at a gas station in which Rickey stuffs dirt in a tennis ball can in the guise of ashes, building to a solid comic capper where an unwitting Glenn kicks away one of the tennis balls, demonstrating Angarano’s penchant throughout for visual physical comedy. And though he does tend to let his soundtrack do too much of the emotional work, I liked Angarano’s choice of Smog’s “Hit the Ground Running” laid over a scene in which the two friends/not-friends end up comically/not-so-comically acting out their passive aggressions in a fighting ring in lieu of going to therapy.

As “Sacramento” closes in on Rickey’s real reason for bringing Glenn there, it can start to feel like a left coast version of last year’s “A Real Pain” but with fatherhood as the subject rather than heritage. That’s not to suggest it’s derivative, just that there are striking similarities between the characters, and just as in “A Real Pain,” Jesse Eisenberg as director let his acting co-star Keiran Culkin walk away with the picture so, too, is Angarano content to center his picture as Cera’s. And though the script might have stood to round out Glenn a little more, especially where his job is concerned, Cera brings the character fully to life, nevertheless, bordering on unlikable without tipping over into unsympathetic.

As good as Cera is, though, Stewart quietly, effortlessly walks away with “Sacramento” despite limited screen time. If one more tale of immature dudes finding the wherewithal to mount up and become men leaves you nonplussed, honestly, I understand, and the truth is, “Sacramento” isn’t entirely helped by its ending glossing over some tough questions with montages. Neither, though, does “Sacramento” abandon its female characters in the way that Rickey and Glenn do. As Rickey’s old flame Tallie, who appears at the beginning and then again toward the end, Maya Erskine makes the movie itself and its deliberate semi-aimlessness focus as much as Rickey himself. Her character, though, is also more well-drawn than Stewart’s and so it’s an extra testament to the latter that she still makes Rosie feel lived-in. Written as almost heroically patient, Stewart smartly lets quiet exasperation still seep through, bringing the character’s dressing down of Glenn that she shouldn’t have to take care of him like a second infant to life. 

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.