Hungry Heart: Review of Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
★★★☆
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
I’ve been a Bruce Springsteen fan my entire adult life. Going back to my college days listening to Greetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle, I—like millions of other fans—have been enthralled and excited by Springsteen’s energy, magnetism, and unvarnished enthusiasm for decades. His music tapped something very personal it me, as it did—and has—for many, many others.
I was in my early twenties when Springsteen’s Nebraska came out. The album was beyond a simple departure from his normal high-energy brand of rock and roll. Its simplicity and austerity—and its darkness bordering on desperation—touched something in me. It resonated. When I heard that a biopic of Springsteen focusing on the inception of Nebraska was coming out, I was eager to see it, even though I typically find musical biopics wanting as a genre—not because of performances or direction, but because of the subject matter itself.
Although it may seem counterintuitive, in my experience, music biopics are typically hampered by audience knowledge and expectations of the subject. Fans of biopic music icons are bound to compare these cinematic performances with the real thing and become preoccupied with the veracity of the performances and, as a result, be less involved in the narrative and thematic elements of the story.
Part of this prior knowledge is audience familiarity with the lives and struggles of their idols. So, one of the challenges for biopic creators is to bring something new to the story—which has been the problem with many of these types of films. One biopic that did manage to give us a deeper, fresh—and more harrowing—look at its protagonist was The Apprentice, the story of Donald Trump’s evolution (devolution) into what he is today. It managed to reveal how events and choices in his life created a heartless and ruthless monster.
But unfortunately, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, like A Complete Unknown, Bohemian Rhapsody, and countless others, is little more than a stale rehash of the life and struggles of one of America’s most beloved musicians and songwriters.
A Complete Unknown boasted an incredible performance by Timothee Chalamet. His Dylan performances were dead-on, but even so, the film still felt flat. The same was true of Rami Malek’s performance as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody. As great as they are, the brilliant portrayals and musical performances by the stars of these films are not enough to carry the day.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere starts with a black and white flashback of Bruce as a child (Matthew Anthony Pellicano), focusing on the difficult relationship he had with his father (Stephen Graham), a relationship that still haunts the adult Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White). As it cuts to the present, the film shows Bruce unwinding after the last show of his tour of his album The River. Needing a rest and a break from his newfound fame, his agent John Landau (Jeremy Strong) arranges for him to go to a rental home in Colt’s Neck, near Freeport, his hometown
Staying in the house alone, Bruce starts working on his next album, but after watching the film Badlands, becomes fascinated with the serial killer Charles Starkweather. After researching his life, he writes the song Nebraska. Enlisting the help of recording engineer Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser), he sets up a four-track in his bedroom to record Nebraskaand some other new songs as a solo artist.
Bruce occasionally treks out to the music club The Stone Pony to jam with friends. One night, he runs into an old school buddy and his sister Faye (Odessa Young), with whom he starts a romantic relationship.
Bruce’s new work is dark and somber, about the harsh realities of blue-collar life and influenced by his childhood memories—particularly his relationship with his father. He goes to record some of the new tracks (including some that will be on his hit album Born in the USA) with the E Street Band but is unsatisfied with the full-band sound of his Nebraska cuts. Determined to preserve the sparse quality of the four-track recordings made in the Colt’s Neck house, he refuses to complete the recording of the hit songs of the Born in the USA project until his Nebraska project is completed.
Despite the inevitable—and somewhat cliched—objections of the record company, Landau backs up his friend and insists on the company recording the songs as Springsteen envisioned them before continuing with his more mainstream project. Producing Bruce’s sparse vision on vinyl is difficult but Landau sees it through. Suffering from chronic depression, Bruce breaks up with Faye and moves to LA, where he suffers a breakdown and finally reconciles with his father.
The struggling artist is an old story but a compelling one. From Vincent Van Gogh to Sylvia Plath to Amy Winehouse to Kurt Cobain, we have seen self-destructive creative souls trying to come to terms with their lives and their art. Although Bruce Springsteen is one of the most beloved and acclaimed of our modern cultural icons, he too has his demons.
Deliver Me from Nowhere is a good movie that could have been a great one. Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong deliver the best performances of their respective careers. White’s rendition of the recording of “Born in the USA” is simply brilliant. He portrays Springsteen with a soft-spoken empathy and burning passion that defines him to a tee. Jeremy Strong’s usual intensity is only slightly tempered in his portrayal of the compassionate and paternal Landau. His concern for his client and his friend never takes a back seat to the pecuniary concerns of the record company.
Yet their stellar performances cannot stop the story from lagging. The script is choppy, jumping erratically from Bruce’s musical endeavors to his dates with Faye to the black and white flashbacks with his father to his heart-to-hearts with John Landau without establishing a consistent coherence. As the narrative is based on a true story, the events are necessarily historically accurate. The trouble is that the facts by themselves do not always gel into a coherent portrait.
When the narrative describes Bruce experiencing bad memories of his father that manifest themselves in his music coupled with his fascination with Charles Starkweather, it works. That much is coherent and resonates, and that’s where the focus of the film should have stayed. His relationship with Faye seems extraneous to this narrative, as do his excursions to the Stone Pony to jam with friends. Faye seems to be a trope, a cliché of the genre—the woman who represents how the hero cannot relate. The Stone Pony jams are just there, not advancing the storyline at all.
Another disappointment to me as a Springsteen fan was the very brief appearance of the E Street Band. I would love to have seen how they put “Born in the USA” together. Another point that might have been amplified was Bruce’s motivation for going to play at The Stone Pony. Was he lonely for people, for applause, or did he need to perform to validate himself? Or did he just want a break?
While Springsteen’s increasing depression and its causes are clearly described, the screenplay does not delve deeply enough into his persona to explain some of his other behaviors. While it is impossible to completely comprehend another mind or soul, this film could have moved us closer into a deeper insight into this man.
Most of us will only know Bruce Springsteen through his music and should consider ourselves lucky to have that. We will probably never definitively know the psychological essence of his artistic drive or the sensibility as much as we try to explain them, but the results are enough. We should all have a boss like this. He never falls short. It’s too bad this film did.