Rating 5/10
I first became aware of Bruce Springsteen in my early teens during the summer of 1984. The song “Dancing in the Dark” was everywhere, on the radio and on MTV. The video had a joyful Bruce pulling a young, unknown Courteney Cox onstage to dance with him. It was the first single from Born in the USA, the 1984 album that turned him into a global superstar and produced an astonishing seven hit singles.
But Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere shows us a different side of “The Boss.” Like recent music biopics A Complete Unknown and Bob Marley: One Love, this drama zeroes in on a narrow chapter in a musician’s career. In this case, we delve into the making of his 1982 album Nebraska. Adapted from Warren Zanes’s 2023 book of the same name (and drawing on Springsteen’s autobiography Born to Run), it chronicles the personal and professional struggles that led to his bleakest, most introspective work.
The year 1981 was a challenging period in the singer’s life. After the triumph of The River tour, Bruce (Jeremy Allen White) retreats to a rented house near his New Jersey hometown, seeking solitude and relief from fame. He’s haunted by a complicated relationship with his father (Stephen Graham), and channels that pain into a series of stark, acoustic demos with his guitar tech, Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser). His other inspirations are the working-class lives around him, childhood memories, and the films Badlands and Night of the Hunter. These give rise to the haunting minimalism that defines Nebraska.
It’s not entirely despair, though. Bruce forms a tentative bond with Faye Romano (Odessa Young), a composite of the women he dated during this time. She is nurturing towards him, but he remains personally distant. Meanwhile, his mother, Adele (Gaby Hoffmann), and manager, Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), provide emotional and creative guidance. The record label wants radio hits. Some of the tunes written during this period would later appear on Born in the USA. But for Nebraska, he rejects what would eventually become hit singles and takes a leap of faith, producing something raw and more personal. It’s a risky move. He endures a breakdown but reemerges, renewed and ready to move toward the superstardom that his next album would bring.
I appreciated the details behind Springsteen’s songwriting process. How some of his most iconic tracks came to be is explored. We see the origins of “Cover Me,” which he initially wrote for Donna Summer before reclaiming it for himself. Filmmaker Paul Schrader once sent him a script intended to star the singer himself alongside Robert De Niro. He never read it, but the script’s working title, Born in the USA, inspired a classic about a disillusioned Vietnam veteran. The insights also highlight the lyrical shift from “we” to “I” in a song originally titled “Starkweather,” which he renames “Nebraska.”
Anyone familiar with the Nebraska album will appreciate the context this account provides. It helps explain why the patron saint of New Jersey released such a bleak album at the height of his momentum. Still, I found myself sympathizing with record executive Al Teller (David Krumholtz), who’s positioned as the corporate villain. His worry about Bruce’s artistic direction was, frankly, understandable. After the pop success of “Hungry Heart,” this detour into desolation looks like a step backward. With so many extraordinary highs in Springsteen’s journey, why focus on the lows?
That creative choice falls on writer-director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Black Mass). Taking an unconventional route can often yield great insight. However, this saga still feels like a checklist of musical-biopic clichés: the abusive father, the protective mother, the romantic distraction, the tortured genius wrestling with fame. We’ve seen all this before, and better. Worse, the central conceit that massive wealth and glory make an artist miserable is alienating. That’s a hardship few can relate to. It makes Deliver Me from Nowhere a movie about the sorrows of the 1%.
Jeremy Allen White has been praised for performing the songs himself rather than lip-syncing. To his credit, he sounds incredible. In fact, his vocal performance so closely approximates Springsteen’s that it’s startling. Yet that achievement creates a strange effect. The precision diminishes some of the mystique, as if what once felt singular can now be convincingly recreated by an actor with no musical background. Despite the stellar vocals, White’s portrayal serves a dour, internally closed-off personality. His Bruce is so relentlessly morose that it drains the film of life. I can’t believe the real Springsteen could ever be this dull, but if so, then Jeremy Allen White channels him perfectly. This portrait offers a somber picture of a vital artist. It captures his darkness but forgets the fire.
10-27-25