Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
Directed by Scott Cooper
Written by Scott Cooper, based on the book Deliver Me from Nowhere by Warren Zanes
Starring Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong and Odessa Young
Classification PG; 119 minutes
Opens in theatres Oct. 24
The Bear star Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, which follows the musician through the production of his album Nebraska.20th Century Studios/Supplied
The team behind Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere know that they have set themselves up with a particularly tough challenge.
How else to explain the film’s unusual preshow introduction from writer-director Scott Cooper, in which he explains to moviegoers – prepares them, really – that what they are about to watch is not “the whole story” of Bruce Springsteen’s life, but rather a very specific look at the making of his 1982 album Nebraska.
We might hear snippets of such chart-toppers as Hungry Heart (from 1980s The River) and Born in the U.S.A. (once a part of Nebraska before being temporarily shelved) along the way, but this is a film focused on the most pure and demanding work of the Boss’s catalogue. And with all the dark, difficult emotional waves that accompanied the album’s creation. Glory days, these are not.
Cooper’s approach is theoretically commendable, and there is a thick through-line between the filmmaker’s desire to capture inner-life intimacy (versus stadium-sized electricity) with that of Springsteen’s own minimalist vision for Nebraska. But sometimes when you strip your story down too far, you’re left with nothing much at all.
Succession alum Jeremy Strong plays Jon Landau in writer-director Scott Cooper's Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere.20th Century Studios/Supplied
The arc of Bruce Springsteen’s career should be ripe, juicy material. The months-long stretch in which he hid himself away in a New Jersey lake house with nothing but the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, a copy of Terrence Malick’s Badlands, and a now-primitive four-track TEAC 144 Portastudio recorder for company? Not so much, it turns out, even when that scenario is placed upon the sturdy shoulders of Jeremy Allen White (The Bear), an intensely committed actor ready to lay down his life on a highway jammed with broken heroes for a last chance power drive.
Cooper, who is an old if not exactly steady hand at making movies about blue-collar rogues (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace), tries to beef up the drama wherever possible but only ends up thinning the material in the process.
There is Bruce’s burgeoning romance with waitress and single mother Faye (Odessa Young), a composite character whose presence can’t help but feel fleeting given what we already know about Springsteen’s eventual marriage. There are a series of increasingly grating flashbacks to Bruce’s childhood, black-and-white segments that feel grossly miscalculated to the point of Walk Hard-esque parody, up to and including over-the-top performances by normally reliable performers (Gaby Hoffmann as Bruce’s mom, Stephen Graham as his alcoholic pops).
And then there’s Cooper’s reliance on imagery from two films – Malick’s Badlands and Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter – whose few collected seconds of footage elicit more intense gut reactions than a million minutes of Deliver Me from Nowhere.
Cooper’s minimalist approach is commendable, but leaves viewers wanting more, writes Barry Hertz.20th Century Studios/Supplied
What might be most interesting about the film is what’s missing from it. Presumably there should be some tensions between Bruce and his E Street bandmates, given that the group’s re-recordings of Nebraska’s tracks were ultimately tossed by the Boss, who felt that the songs were being overproduced.
Yet the film doesn’t afford a single line of dialogue to Steven Van Zandt, Max Weinberg, Clarence Clemons, or any other E Streeter. The closest we get to any in-studio drama is watching mixing engineer Chuck Plotkin (Marc Maron, in a part that feels as if it was edited down to a nub in the cutting room) desperately trying to preserve the raw sound of Bruce’s original TEAC 144 sessions.
And when Bruce is finally driven to seek professional help for the depression engulfing his Nebraska era, Cooper inserts an easy-way-out time jump that might be deeply moving if it were not in fact so unintentionally hilarious.
The film only clicks into place when Bruce sits down with his long-time manager and producer Jon Landau (Succession’s Jeremy Strong) for various heart to hearts. There is a clean and sincere simplicity to Bruce and Jon’s interactions – the kind of emotional clarity that otherwise eludes Cooper’s work – with the two great prestige-TV Jeremys of our time each giving each other as much support as they get.
The film never catches fire, but White and Strong do their very best to give it a spark.