Desolate, grim, and hopelessly introverted, The Boss’s album Nebraska captures a slice of America that’s as caustic and fresh today as it was in 1981. You put it on, and you’re there: sipping a Miller Lite in a lonely roadhouse, trawling a boardwalk in the dead of night, or standing on the side of an empty freeway. It’s a road trip through the dark corners of the country as graceful as it is threatening. One might even call it cinematic.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere — based on the book by Warren Zanes about the making of Nebraska and appendaged with the musician’s name for marketing purposes — is nothing like that. In his introduction for the film at the New York Film Festival, Scott Cooper praised Nebraska, saying “art is most valuable when it risks it all,” but his movie retains none of that risky art’s venom, gothic dread, or imagination. It’s not a persuasive Springsteen simulator, and it’s not in tune with the vicissitudes of American life. Instead, it’s generic, insincere, and in direct opposition to everything Nebraska represents.
Jeremy Allen White stars, or rather cosplays, as Bruce Springsteen, bringing a studied brutish force to the role and not much else. Timothee Chalamet was able to channel a blank slate Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown by way of puckish impression, and it worked to the degree that it did because the movie didn’t ask him to be anything more than a symbol. But Deliver Me from Nowhere is all interiority, supposedly. Enigmatic doesn’t work when you’re spending most of the runtime excavating childhood trauma.
We open in Freehold, New Jersey, in the 1950s, during which a young Bruce Springsteen’s Big Bad Dad stomps around, threatens him, and pounds on his mother offscreen. Overwrought flashbacks like this intrude on the movie like bad acne, popping out in pointless black and white and failing to lend any gravitas to Springsteen’s life. We then cut to Springsteen in 1981, performing “Born to Run” to a huge crowd. After the show, Springsteen sits in his dressing room, flop sweat pouring out of him onto the floor in an image recalling that other, better New Jersey movie The Wrestler (to which Springsteen himself contributed a co-sign in the form of a rich late-career track for its closing credits). Say what you will about Aronofsky, but his passion for pain and fragile masculinity contributed to a more compelling vision of working-class New Jersey than Cooper contrives here. Cooper depicts Jersey like a tourist, an interloper: we visit the Stone Pony, we enter Springsteen’s childhood home, and we spend time with wizened faces in the diners he frequented, but the spaces are rinsed clean and missing a sense of melancholy Americana: the milieu in which Springsteen found himself around the time Nebraska was being recorded.
Deep from within Deliver Me from Nowhere hums the faint echo (or reverb) of Love & Mercy, another music movie bifurcated between its better Pet Sounds sessions material and the wonkier stuff dealing with Brian Wilson’s so-called doctor Eugene Landy. Except here, neither half is good. The drama, in either flashback or in the movie’s present tense, isn’t remotely enough to justify the black hole pull of the record Springsteen creates by the end of it. When not in his bedroom recording, Bruce sulks around the tristate area, sparking an asinine doomed romance and stopping by New York to get his routine gassing by producer Jon Landau, for whom the movie is just as propagandistic as it is for Springsteen. Attempts to wrestle with male feelings — which can be done, just take a look at The Iron Claw, a movie that plays to White’s dead-eyed strengths — play with the cloying condescension of a Jeff Lebowski: “Grown men also cry, Mr. Lebowski. Grown men also cry.”
Cooper doesn’t do himself any favors by interpolating movies like Badlands, which served as an inspiration for Nebraska’s title track, or The Night of the Hunter, which might be the very best movie America has ever produced about its own corrupt nature. It’s dangerous to put better movies in the audience’s head because you run the risk of drawing direct comparison, and — feel free to put some money on it — in no scenario does Scott Cooper stand within 10 miles of Terrence Malick or Charles Laughton’s stature. These are full, minute-long diversions, too, not just clips playing on TV in the background. Cooper will go full widescreen into a scene from Badlands, then cut directly to his sloppy homage to it — inevitably another artless flashback. In doing backflips to show he has good taste, he underscores the severe poverty of his own style.
Mercifully, it’s not all signs pointing to the movie this could have been. Occasionally, Deliver Me from Nowhere is actually about a quiet battle to make an honest record, and there’s an inkling of Springsteen’s inner struggle to create a work of art that matters to him when beset by professional pressures. We join him researching old newspapers at the library and reading Flannery O’Connor stories at home, doing 110 MPH listening to Suicide (whose fingerprints are all over Nebraska) and frustrated at the studio with the full-band versions of his tracks. And there’s a montage set to “I’m on Fire” that’s pretty neat: after Springsteen insists his crew master Nebraska off the cassette he recorded in his bedroom, they do so, and an analog tech fetish sets in that’s really fun to hang out with.
But even then, Cooper misses a crucial component of artmaking — that it doesn’t have to be autobiographical in order to be personal or moving. He’s constantly searching in vain for connections between the child Springsteen once was and the artist he becomes. The link between Bruce defending his mother from his father’s hand as a kid in one scene and his switching the song “Nebraska” from third- to first-person in the next, for example, is nonsensical. Other times, the correlation will be idiotically obvious: Bruce’s dad takes him to see a mansion on a hill, and, wouldn’t you know it, the older Springsteen then writes “Mansion on the Hill.”
Bruce Springsteen is a great artist because he can tell stories about troubled Americans that give us the space to metabolize our own experiences against the expressionistic backdrop of his music. A great music movie emboldens the musician it depicts, inspiring its audience to bring them into our own lives, in our own way. Deliver Me from Nowhere listens to Bruce Springsteen for you, chewing him up and regurgitating him in a thick, wet, flavorless paste. At least we get Electric Nebraska as a consolation prize.
DIRECTOR: Scott Cooper; CAST: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Gaby Hoffman, Stephen Graham; DISTRIBUTOR: 20th Century Studios; IN THEATERS: October 24; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 0 min.
Originally published as part of NYFF 2025 — Dispatch 5.
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