It\u2019s a moment that signifies everything that\u2019s wrong with the current epidemic of boomer-friendly rock-star biopics: a patently false, comically phony moment, entirely free of subtext or subtlety, conveying information in the most flat and undramatic manner imaginable. It\u2019s a moment that would get you tossed out of any beginning screenwriter\u2019s class, but audiences just shrug and accept it because no one\u2019s going to these movies to be surprised. They\u2019re there for the same reason they\u2019re at a jukebox musical on Broadway: to hear the hits. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What\u2019s disappointing is that so many fine filmmakers are spending their time and energy on boilerplate brand maintenance exercises for millionaires. Scott Cooper is a hit-and-miss filmmaker, to be sure (if I never see Black Mass<\/em> again, it\u2019ll be too soon), but he\u2019s directed good films: Out of the Furnace, Hostiles, The Pale Blue Eye<\/em>, <\/em>and especially Crazy Heart<\/em>, a drama about a fictional singer\/songwriter that probably made it seem like a good idea for him to make a movie about Bruce Springsteen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To his credit, Deliver Me from Nowhere<\/em> doesn\u2019t try to be a cradle-to-grave biopic, instead focusing on the period in which Springsteen wrote and recorded the 1982 Nebraska<\/em> album, a personal and professional inflection point. His previous album The River<\/em> had been a big hit, so his record company is anxious for a follow-up: \u201cThe iron\u2019s hot!\u201d says Al Teller (David Krumholz). \u201cWe think that he\u2019s gonna hit it out of the park!\u201d (Everyone in this movie talks like that.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The best material here (most of it from Warren Zanes\u2019s non-fiction book about the album) digs into the particulars of his process<\/a>. We see how Springsteen finds the title song, which unlocks the feel of the album: he stumbles on Badlands<\/em> on TV one night, slams through microfiche at the library reading about Charles Starkweather, puts words on the page, tries chords on his axe. He finds the sound, unexpectedly, in the wonky home studio four-track set-up that he initially intends simply for working out songs, only to find that \u201cWhatever\u2019s off sounds just right to me,\u201d so they spend night after night in the studio, struggling to recapture the quality of the demos. He finally tells his engineers to make that dirty cassette recording into a releasable album, and the mechanics of that process are fascinating \u2014 presumably because we haven\u2019t seen them dramatized in 30 other movies.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cooper is not so skilled at portraying the process of putting an album together (Springsteen writes \u201cSONG LIST\u201d on a piece of notebook paper, jots down songs, and then writes \u201cDOUBLE ALBUM??\u201d) or at visualizing the music. \u201cAtlantic City\u201d is explained by a corny boardwalk montage; the opening line of \u201cMy Father\u2019s House,\u201d \u201cI heard the wind rustling through the trees,\u201d is accompanied by\u2026 a shot of Bruce as a child, sitting by a tree. And yes, despite the narrow focus on the Nebraska<\/em> era, Cooper indulges in trite, black-and-white flashbacks of Bruce as a child, detailing his strained relationship with his father; the less said about these scenes, the better.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jeremy Allen White, a terrific actor, makes no impression at all as Bruce; he never finds a way to play Springsteen as a character rather than a myth, and Cooper\u2019s script certainly doesn\u2019t provide him with one. Odessa Young, unknown to me, is charming as love interest Faye Romano (a composite character), and she and White generate plenty of chemistry. But it\u2019s the most dusty-ass, done-to-death excuse for a relationship subplot imaginable \u2014 he has intimacy issues, you see, so she has to say things like \u201cI just wish you\u2019d let me in\u201d and \u201cThis is about you runnin\u2019 away from everything that scares you.\u201d It feels like there are key scenes missing from the middle of the relationship, but maybe they figured we didn\u2019t need them, since we\u2019ve seen it so many times before. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Jeremy Strong is good, grounded and centered, as Springsteen\u2019s manager and producer Jon Landau, whose job is to \u201cdeal with the noise,\u201d and he does his best to convey that push-pull, trying to be supportive and simultaneously satisfy the suits. His well-placed looks of quiet resignation do a lot of work, but even he can\u2019t do anything with the reams of expositional dialogue and psychological insights that he\u2019s forced to try to pass off as dialogue. (Grace Gummer, as his wife, has the even more unfortunate job of existing solely to listen to those lines, and nod with understanding.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n Actors like movies like Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere<\/em> because they allow them to play dress-up, to wow Oscar viewers not with the skill of their acting but with the aptitude of their impersonation. (As White and the stand-in E Street Band roar through a full performance of \u201cBorn in the U.S.A.,\u201d I realized what I was watching was less a movie than an expensive episode of Celebrity Lip-Synch Battle<\/em>.) Audiences like movies like this because they don\u2019t ask anything of them; they know the story that\u2019s being told, the fans in its specifics and the casuals in the never-shifting arc of the music biopic, they know the songs that are being sung, and they know exactly how they\u2019re going to make them feel. It\u2019s what passes for moviemaking for adults these days, simply because the hot star of the moment is dressed up as a rock star rather than a superhero, but the impulse is the same: people who go to the movies for the experience, memorably defined by @dril<\/a>, as \u201cthinking about shit that i Recognize and smiling.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” is in theaters this weekend.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/deliver2-1024x683.webp\")
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