Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere Review (2025 BFI London Film Festival)
The opening scenes of Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere immediately tell you what to expect. A little boy in 1950s New Jersey is sent by his mother to look for his dad and, finding him propping up his usual bar, begs him to come home. Then the action shifts to the brash colour, lights and pounding music of an early Bruce Springsteen concert. They’re essentially the two halves of the story, which, as the film unfolds, become increasingly and inextricably intertwined.
They’re also familiar cinematic tropes that point in the direction of a conventional biopic of The Boss and come perilously close to being clichés. But while director Scott Cooper’s look at the star on the verge of going stratospheric isn’t especially imaginative, it at least manages to avoid banality. He’s chosen the time in the 1980s when Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) took a radical approach to making a new album. Holed up in a holiday home in New Jersey, the songs reflect his past and random memories, but he records them on a very rudimentary cassette-based system. It’s not an approach that goes down well with his record company, but he has the constant support, protection and business brain of his manager, John Landau (Jeremy Strong), in his corner.
There’s another side to his life. Meeting and falling in love with waitress Fay (Odessa Young) turns out to be a wake-up call, one that encourages him to bite the bullet and face the pain of his past, especially the trauma he suffered at the hands of his father (Stephen Graham). The resulting album, Nebraska, was the result of the collision between his depression and his music.
Cooper’s set himself a tough task. Composing music and working out the lyrics is an internal process and, as such, not necessarily cinematic, and the same applies to his depression. It isolates him: he can’t explain it to others, let alone himself, but his route to some form of understanding comes through a familiar narrative, the proverbial love of a good woman. And, while Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is just as much about depression as it is about music, it’s the latter where the real interest lies. Getting his lyrics on paper in thick marker pen is, in itself, evocativ,e but it’s when he tries to create the right sound for his songs that things unexpectedly take off.
Music buffs will love this aspect of the film, but even those who can’t tell a crotchet from a quaver will be fascinated by the detail that goes into his determination to transfer his work from a basic cassette tape to vastly superior vinyl. That two of the film’s most engaging supporting performances play key roles here – Paul Walter Hauser as the guitar tech who puts together the early recording set-up and Marc Maron as the grizzled engineer who relentlessly tracks down a vinyl specialist – gives this part of the story genuine energy.
For those who love The Boss’s music, there’s more than enough of it in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere to keep them happy, with White doing his own singing and launching himself into the performance sequences with buckets of sweaty energy. Away from the stage, he takes time to create his character, so the connection between actor and audience comes slowly. He’s hardly ever off the screen, but it’s only in the latter stages that he actually commands it. Like his performance, the film as a whole is a near-miss, never really managing to get to the heart of the creative process or the devastating effects of depression. You may find yourself yet again listening non-stop to Springsteen’s music afterwards, but the movie will leave you with a certain emptiness.
★★★
Screened at the London Film Festival on 15th, 16th and 18th October / In UK cinemas from October 24th / Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Odessa Young, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham / Dir: Scott Cooper / 20th Century Studios / 12A
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