Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere

by Julian Spivey

Photo: 20th Century Studios

Director: Scott Cooper
Starring: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong & Stephen Graham
Rated: PG-13 (language, thematic material, smoking & some sexuality)
Runtime: 2 hours

​Bruce Springsteen is my idol.

So, there’s likely going to be bias on my part when it comes to a movie based on a portion of his life. I might like the movie more than some, but I’m also likely to be harsher on it if it doesn’t get things or the feeling right.

Director/writer Scott Cooper’s “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere,” based on Warren Zanes’ 2023 book Deliver Me from Nowhere, on the making of Springsteen’s stripped-down 1982 solo album Nebraska, impressed me in how it captured the struggle of an artist who might not know the ins-and-outs of why he wants his art to be the way it is but deep down feels it has to be that way.

As a longtime Springsteen fan, Nebraska frankly isn’t the album I’d have chosen to build a film around. I’d have preferred a film about the making of 1975’s Born to Run, the album that both saved and made Springsteen’s career, and happens to be my favorite album of all time. But I can understand why Nebraska is the album where a filmmaker can get to the core of what it means to be a true artist.

Some critics are writing “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” off as just another biopic of a famous person. The biopic genre, especially those about musicians, has become one of the most hated film genres among many, especially critics, over the last two decades.

But ‘Deliver Me from Nowhere’ isn’t your typical biopic. It’s more of a character study of a man who feels something strongly, fights for it and struggles to understand it – it just so happens to be one of the world’s most famous music makers and a true story.

Jeremy Allen White inhabits the role of Springsteen, which is something I never really doubted. White has shown, for multiple seasons on his terrific television series “The Bear,” that if there’s one thing he can completely knock out of the park as an actor, it’s the role of a tortured artist. White has captured Springsteen's mannerisms and performance style exquisitely in this film.

The casting of the main roles in ‘Deliver Me from Nowhere’ was terrific, with Academy Award-nominated and Emmy Award-winning Jeremy Strong as Springsteen’s loyal manager Jon Landau. A movie on the making of Born to Run would’ve done a good job at explaining the Springsteen/Landau relationship, but we’re asked just to believe it for this time period. White and Strong do a good job of bringing the two's' brotherhood to the screen, even without much to explain it in the script.

Stephen Graham, fresh off his Emmy Award-winning performance in the terrific Netflix miniseries “Adolescence,” was a terrific casting for the role of Springsteen’s father, Douglas, who dealt with demons throughout Springsteen’s childhood that the musician would fight himself as an adult, which were undiagnosed at the time, but have later become known to be depression.

White, Strong and Graham are all terrific at acting without words, letting their facial expressions and body language tell an audience all they need to know.

Any weaknesses within ‘Deliver Me from Nowhere’ come from Cooper not being able to bring forth the “why” as to why Springsteen feels the way he does about his work on Nebraska. But you get the feeling, watching the film, that Springsteen probably didn’t fully understand the “why” himself; it was just a feeling deep down in his soul. Something he felt and needed to get out into the world before it ate him up inside. Yes, it had something to do with his father, his upbringing, and a feeling of imposter syndrome, but maybe the script could’ve been a little clearer about this.