When my regular Saturday outing to the movies with my son changed unexpectedly because he was asked to work late, I decided to go myself to an earlier show than we had planned. I headed to Alamo, a theater chain I like because you can order dinner and drinks, but also because of its pre-show, typically featuring cheesy advertisements from decades ago and clips from campy films. Since the movie du jour was the new Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere, we were treated to some Saturday Night Live bits from the nineties, like the one where the gifted mimic Adam Sandler sings “Dancing in the Dark” to Courtney Cox, featured in the original MTV video, when she hosted the show. (The comedy comes from Sandler needing help with the lyrics from her, and not shutting up during her opening monologue when she tries to explain who’s on SNL that week.) There was also a classic clip where the real Springsteen delivers imaginary relationship advice to John Cusack in High Fidelity (2000), and one from Ben Stiller’s now-forgotten TV show where Abraham Lincoln is trying to write the Gettysburg Address at a bar and Bruce gives him counsel (instead of 87, try “Four Score and Seven Years,” he suggests). Given that these skits were made after his eighties heyday, it’s indicative of the place in American culture Springsteen had attained—and indeed retains—in the decades since.
In this context, it’s worth noting that, notwithstanding his mainstream stature, Springsteen has often been an iconoclastic figure in popular music. He got his start by performing songs—like obscure rhythm & blues from the fifties—on which his own early records were based. One might expect that a biopic about his career to be a tale in which a clueless working-class kid signs a problematic contract on the hood of a car in a dark parking lot and triumphs over adversity (seems too clichéd to be true, but it is).
Instead, Deliver Me from Nowhere is a tale of descent, not ascent. It begins in 1981 with Springsteen on the cusp of global superstardom, frustrating those around him by retreating to a rented house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, to write the songs that became the basis of his deeply haunting 1982 album Nebraska (as well as half of the subsequent Born in the U.S.A.). This well-known chapter in Springsteenania was sensitively chronicled by Warren Zanes, bandleader of the well-regarded Del Fuegos, in his 2023 book Deliver Me from Nowhere, on which the movie is based.
You don’t often get films that actually show a creative process by which art is produced, and the image of Bruce Springsteen reading microfilm at a public library was deeply satisfying to this geek. All the more striking is that the arc of the story shows a man with a family history of mental illness sinking into depression, which is again counterintuitive. The film includes black & white flashbacks of boy Bruce with his alternately menacing and pathetic father, Douglas, magnificently played by Stephen Graham of Adolescence fame. Graham has quietly built an impressive body of work over the last two decades, for which he has not received adequate recognition.
The rest of the cast is also superb. This begins with Jeremy Allen White. As a Springsteen watcher for a half-century, I found his portrayal to be uncanny in demeanor, movement, and the cadence of his speech. (Props also to costume designers Kasia Willicka Maimone and Brittany Loar.) Jeremy Strong disappears into the role of Springsteen manager Jon Landau, though he sometimes seems to exist for the purpose of exposition more than anything else (he talks to his wife, played by Mamie Gummer, daughter of Meryl Streep, who was born a few months before Springsteen in a leafier precinct of New Jersey). Aussie actor Odessa Young plays Faye, a composite of Springsteen's love interests at the time, and I’m glad the movie is honest in depicting his all-too-human failures in this regard. The climax of the film is the real-life breakdown he suffered on a cross-country trip. He recovered with the help of psychotherapy and medication, something he’s been forthright about and as such does real good.
One of the odder aspects of Deliver Me from Nowhere is how little it shows of Springsteen the showman, whose capacity to express and elicit joy has been the foundation of his success to this day. We get shots of him showing up at Asbury Park dive the Stone Pony, but he’s a surprisingly grim supporting player. (I also would have liked to see more of the life force that was Springsteen’s mother, Adele, played by Gaby Hoffman, who stood by her troubled husband and yet was the life of many a party.) We see Springsteen perform “Born to Run” at the outset, and there’s a thrilling scene of him recording “Born in the U.S.A.,” which indeed was captured in a single take in the studio circa 1982. But that’s a brutal song whose original acoustic version is even more harrowing. My Springsteen has always been the artist who produced a body of work over which I could pore obsessively. But the one most of his fans have loved—the ones who showed up for what is normally a graveyard 6 p.m. show at the Alamo—is the one that has them dancing in the aisles. That said, the early indications are that Deliver Me from Nowhere is a box office dud. I think you can see why.
But I loved it. And I love Nebraska, an album home-recorded on a cassette and released, amid great technical difficulties, essentially as is. Listening to it feels like reading a short story collection from Flannery O’Connor, an important influence on Springsteen at the time. The tales he tells can be crushing. But they make the glimmers of hope—“Everything dies baby that’s a fact / But maybe everything that dies someday comes back”—all the more precious and authentic. Deliver Me from Nowhere shows us a man who redeemed his time.