When the first trailer for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere was released this summer, skeptical viewers immediately seized on a monologue delivered by Jon Landau (played by Jeremy Strong), Bruce Springsteen’s longtime manager, explaining that the young Boss grew up with a hole in the floor of his childhood bedroom. “What he’s doing with this album is, he’s repairing that hole in his floor,” Landau says, somewhat literally, about Springsteen’s creative process. “He’s repairing that hole in himself.”
The speech was wisely excised from the final theatrical cut, but the “hole” line lingers over the writer-director Scott Cooper’s film, in which Springsteen’s childhood is an open wound—the abyss he gazes into as he writes the songs that would appear on his 1982 album, Nebraska. Deliver Me From Nowhere follows Warren Zanes’s book of the same title in emphasizing Nebraska as a personal breakthrough, one that was followed by a near–mental breakdown. But in this totalizing autobiographical framing, the majesty of the record is reduced to paternal conflict and blocked masculinity as the film undersells the scope of Springsteen’s engagement with American iconography and musical traditions.
Deliver Me From Nowhere opens in black and white, in the 1950s, as young Springsteen’s mother drives him to the local bar to retrieve his father, a frustrated working stiff impatient for his boy to become a man. As portrayed by Stephen Graham, one of the stars of Netflix’s hit drama Adolescence, Springsteen’s father is an intimidating figure, capable of violent outbursts and equally frightening silences. The movie then jumps forward to the adult Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) in 1981: a rock god in tight jeans and sweat-soaked work shirt, closing out his tour in support of The River, his first LP to top the Billboard charts.
But he feels restless and creatively stagnant, and once he’s settled in a house that his management has rented for him, he begins to write a new batch of songs, recording them in solo acoustic arrangements initially intended as demos. Springsteen’s rental is close enough to his childhood home that he can drive by, as he occasionally does, lurking outside and steeping himself in the bad vibes, before going home to write another song. The film settles into a rhythm: Springsteen writes Nebraska more or less sequentially, some songwriting sessions interspersed with flashbacks to his father coming home in a drunken rage or melancholic mood. A memory surfaces; he records a song to tape, then sends it along to Landau, who listens and then describes its “dark” and “condemned” tone to his wife (Grace Gummer, in the comically thankless role of a woman listening patiently while her guy analyzes classic rock at her).
Released as is—in those spare acoustic arrangements, in defiantly uncommercial packaging—Nebraska would be Springsteen’s least characteristic and most critically lauded album, a collection of stripped-down ballads about desperate working-class characters that stood out like a mile marker on an empty highway. “Nebraska is the most punk thing Bruce ever did,” Cooper told The New York Times, “not in sound, but in spirit”—a frustrating statement because Nebraska actually does sound like the only punk song heard in the film, Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop.” That track blew Springsteen’s mind when he was making his record, and it has a similarly hollowed-out and reverb-haunted soundscape, in which a rock-and-roll whoop sounds like a distant banshee wail. Nebraska is the only time Springsteen made something that sounded so lo-fi and eerie, but that spirit infuses the rest of his work—to the extent that the subject of Suicide’s song, a flailing factory grunt who got married too young, could be a figure from any of Springsteen’s albums.
Cooper’s screenplay is full of these missed connections. The film seems interested in the creative process—one of Landau’s critical riffs concerns the elusive Proustian quality of tape hiss—but largely skips over the unsuccessful full-band recording sessions that convinced Springsteen to release the demos as they were. What it gives us in the studio instead is “Born in the U.S.A.,” also originally composed and recorded as an acoustic demo during the Nebraska period, with White muscling his way through the definitive arena-rock version—a shimmering anthem that was successfully arranged for the band based on Springsteen’s demos, but was eventually held back for his 1984 album of the same name.
[Read: Jeremy Strong is ready to let go, just a little bit]
This crowd-pleasing break from the moodiness of Nebraska is understandable in the film’s context. Just as music documentaries must necessarily involve, and often directly originate from, the holders of a given artist’s publishing rights, the biopic is likewise an investment in a back catalog. Last year’s Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, was preceded by a blockbuster transaction in which Dylan’s catalog was sold to Universal for more than $300 million; similarly, Springsteen’s catalog got about $550 million from Sony Music Entertainment, in 2021. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that the artist biopic tends to be a Great Man narrative, a tacit acknowledgment that the musician at its center is also very much a brand. A Complete Unknown mitigated the tendency to focus entirely on personal turmoil with a cryptic lead performance by Timothée Chalamet that mystified genius more than humanizing it, but both films struggle to imagine where art might come from, if not real life.
The limitations of this genre matter in the case of Springsteen, specifically, because his music has been a conduit for American energies much larger than himself. A Baby Boomer born in 1949, Springsteen as a child would have been more spectator to than participant in the great youthquake of postwar America. Consider 1973’s hot-rod period piece American Graffiti, marketed with the tagline “Where were you in ’62?” That year, Springsteen was turning 13, too young to drive—but he still ended up dressing like James Dean and making music about the open road and fast cars. His signature songs promoted an ideal of escape via horsepower that was drawn from a common store of nostalgic imagery built up during his childhood; his greatest composition, “Racing in the Street,” quotes ’60s Motown and Brian Wilson’s drag-racing songs while telling a story about the specter of thwarted dreams.
Springsteen was, and is, an evangelist for the vitality of American rhythm and blues, beginning with his days playing bar-band boogie on the Asbury Park boardwalk. You could see the utopian promise of the early rock revolution in his epic-length live shows, which were notable for the way he led sing-alongs, worked the crowd, and urged on his E Street bandmates in a self-conscious, quasi-religious exhortation—self-conscious because he was a 20-something kid carrying old music into a post-Vietnam decade of industrial decline and vanishing prosperity. His retro energy turned out to be a good fit for sour times: His songs of fading youth and broken promises conjured a lost innocence and reflected on that loss with bitter hindsight.
Before and after Nebraska, Springsteen wrote songs about the bone-weariness, shattered dreams, throttled rage, and creeping existential fear often felt in small-town America. But Nebraska was his most direct invocation of the grammar on which rock and roll was built: rockabilly rave-ups, folk laments, Delta harmonica, Gospel imagery. If the inspiration came in part from the closed-off doominess of the Springsteen line of men, it was nevertheless conveyed through lyrics about archetypal figures with troubles as timeworn as the blues: wanting money or acquiring it through illicit means; leaving and being left; escaping drudgery or avoiding jail. The title track is an outlaw ballad, a straightforward narrative account of an infamous crime—the exploits of the 1950s spree killer Charles Starkweather, portrayed by Martin Sheen in Terrence Malick’s 1973 classic, Badlands. In the lineage of standards such as “Frankie and Johnny” and “Stagger Lee,” the song is drawn directly from contemporaneous news reports and secondhand embellishments.
In Deliver Me From Nowhere’s rendition, Nebraska went deeper than anything Springsteen had ever done before. It was also what he had to get out of his system so that he could get the E Street Band back together to make the album that—as one of the final title cards reminds us—made him a generational superstar. In actuality, Nebraska is not just a personal triumph but also an artistic one. It endures as the centerpiece of a career spent channeling the myths of modern America and cementing them in the national memory. Just consider Starkweather’s resemblance to James Dean, which Malick and Sheen emphasized in Badlands—surely as relevant to Springsteen, and this album, as whatever reminded him of his dad.
