Photo © 20th Century Studios
Jeremy Allen White in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
When Bruce Springsteen released Nebraska in 1982, his fans were startled by the sudden shift in words and music. The gorgeously conceived rock and pop of Born to Run and the forebodings of Darkness at the Edge of Town gave little clue for Nebraska’s pivot to stark acoustic ballads of failed working-class lives and unmet dreams.
The period of his life that nurtured Nebraska is dramatized in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. Jeremy Allen White plays the Boss just as fans imagined him. Leading the E Street Band at the end of their 1981 tour behind The River, he’s a manic dynamo on stage with enough electricity to light an entire city. (The band is credibly recreated as well). Backstage, he’s an exhausted musical marathon runner. Manager-producer Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) suggests a “change of scenery” and rents him a house in Colts Neck, NJ, near his Asbury Park stomping grounds, where he hangs with the locals and sings at the bar where his musical adventure began, the Stone Pony.
Unlike many films about artists’ lives, Deliver Me from Nowhere is astute in observing the creative process. Springsteen has a troubled mind and turns to Flannery O’Connor stories for sustenance. Strangely moved by catching Terrence Malick’s Badlands on the late show, he begins channeling Woody Guthrie via Bob Dylan, scratching words into notebooks, trying melodies on his acoustic guitar and making demos in that Colts Neck house. The Charles Starkweather murders in ‘50s Nebraska, inspiration for Badlands, hooks into black-and-white flashbacks from Springsteen’s troubled childhood. His father (later diagnosed as schizophrenic) was capable of kindness and brutality and one of the subplots concerns the possibility of reconciliation. In one of Springsteen’s earliest memories, his mother parks outside a corner tavern and sends him into the dark noisy barroom; he stands no taller than a barstool and tells his father, “Mom says it’s time to come home.”
The Hollywood angle of Deliver Me from Nowhere is the romance between Springsteen and a local gal, Faye (Odessa Young), but their relationship is believably folded into this chapter of his creative life. White plays the Boss with the appropriate outsider’s slouch of a working-class kid articulating his vision without the crutch of an MFA or the aid of a college writing workshop. He’s a decent guy given to brooding despite his robust magazine-cover image in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
Landau is flummoxed by the music from Colts Neck and CBS Records is appalled. Springsteen just had a hit with one of his weakest songs, “Hungry Heart” and the label expects more of the same. He’d just completed a sold-out tour—he’s got momentum! And what’s he want to do—release a folk album? Where’s the hit? As in real life, the cinematic Springsteen pushes forward with his vision of a low-fi song collection whose echo endowed them with the distance of voices from the past—or the grave. “He’s afraid of what’s coming, of how big he could get,” Landau tells his wife. He’s afraid of “losing the world he knows.” Much the same concerns troubled Kurt Cobain a decade later with tragic results. Rather than take his own life, Springsteen made one of the most enduring albums of his career.
Most music bio pictures condense a lifetime into two hours, inevitably simplifying and distorting the story. Working from Warren Zanes’ book Deliver Me from Nowhere and the Boss’ Born to Run autobiography, writer-director Scott Cooper departs from the expected format by focusing on a particular phase, a fertile year rich with personal and creative material.
