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.

What Kind of Big Screen Bruce Do We Want?

In the year 2000, Bruce Springsteen appeared briefly in the Stephen Frears-directed adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel “High Fidelity” not so much as himself as a vision of the main character (John Cusack). And as much as I enjoyed “Blinded by the Light” (2019), and the 2013 fan service documentary “Springsteen & I” too, Planet Earth Poet Laureate’s cameo in “High Fidelity” essentially summarized in less than 60 seconds what both those movies took their entire run times to say, that for Springsteen fans, he exists as a spiritual sherpa. And though I’m biased as a longtime resident of E Street, it has always seemed to me that’s all we ever really needed of Bruce on the big screen. He, himself, saw the speciousness of the whole potential exercise back in 1983 when he recorded the cheeky rockabilly “Born in the U.S.A.” outtake “TV Movie.” What, did we really want him to get “Rocketman-ed,” or “Bohemian Rhapsody-ed,” or “Walk the Line-d?” “You might get to thinking you’re ahead of the game / but when you break it all down / it all comes out the same,” sang James McMurtry in “Painting by Numbers,” essentially describing the majority of musician biopics, mere vessels for their actors to get Academy Award nominations, sticking to a formula so rote that “Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story” took it apart element by element.

In 2017, there was some vague news about a movie called “Asbury Park,” set in the Jersey beach town and around its preeminent rock club, the Stone Pony, where Springsteen got his start that, back then at least, seemed to suggest Springsteen would play a supporting role. That was intriguing, not only not making a Springsteen biopic but in a movie about Springsteen’s old stomping ground, keeping him to the side, maybe like a Wolfman Jack in “American Graffiti,” looming large without being the star of the show. As stated, though, that was 2017, and in visiting that prospective film’s entry on IMDb, one discovers that it remains “In Development,” left, perhaps, to hike the streets up in the sky*. (*Obscure Springsteen reference.) If, however, “Asbury Park” is not the answer to our unconventional Springsteen biopic dreams, then perhaps “Deliver Me from Nowhere” is.

I only just learned that Scott Cooper, who wrote and directed Jeff Bridges in “Crazy Heart,” is slated to helm a Bruce Springsteen movie with “The Bear’s” Jeremy Allen White reportedly in talks to star as The Boss himself. Forget whether White may or may not make a credible Bruce (can he do a hoarse laugh?). That’s of less interest to me than the idea supporting the movie and the idea, thankfully, does not appear to be a biopic, or at least, not a traditional biopic, based as it is on Warren Zanes’s book of the same title about Springsteen recording his sixth studio album “Nebraska,” the one he recorded entirely on a 4-track recorder in his New Jersey bedroom, and that also, more or less, is when he conceived of the ensuing “Born in the U.S.A.” too. This is an idea that gives the potential movie crucial focus and real potential. (It is also possible, I concede, that this movie begins with Bruce sitting down at the 4-track recorder in his New Jersey bedroom, triggering the first flashback of many, a la aforementioned Dewey Cox, who “has to think about his entire life before he plays.”)

The involvement of Springsteen himself and his longtime manager Jon Landau might be cause for concern, at least in terms of Cooper having the room to honest and unmerciful, but maybe their involvement is just to ensure Cooper has full access to the singer’s catalogue, so “Atlantic City” doesn’t have to be translated into “Ocean City” like “Piece of My Heart” into “Chunk of My Lung.” But overall, I find myself encouraged. It has the potential to function as a companion piece to “Air” (2023), which claimed in words to know what “Born in the U.S.A.” was about even as the movie itself suggested otherwise, just as “Nebraska” and “Born in the U.S.A.” “were two sides of the same coin,” to quote the rock critic Elizabeth Nelson. “The umbrage-filled bluster of one and the quiet violence of the other taken together are a prophetic nightmare vision of a contemporary America, which can’t tell the difference between an execution and a compliment.” 

Nelson saw further than that, even, to “a relationship between Springsteen and his audience (that) is as moving and unhealthy as rock has ever had on offer,” noting that “‘Nebraska’ was a low confidence vote in a country that simultaneously made him rich and made him doubt everything.” It’s mere wishcasting, especially in a genre where affirmations tend to be what general audiences want more than provocations or questions, but I like imagining a Bruce biopic that rather than reconsecrating the fan relationship one more time might have the guts to hold it up to the light.