Jeremy Allen White steps into the boots of ‘The Boss’ in a new biographical drama that focuses less on fame and more on artistic struggle
The Snapshot: Bruce Springsteen’s haunting acoustic album ‘Nebraska’ takes centre stage for his biopic. While there are moments of brilliance, not every chord is cohesive enough.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
6 out of 10
14A, 2hrs. Music Biography Drama.
Written and directed by Scott Cooper.
Starring Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Odessa Young, Stephen Graham, Paul Walter Hauser and Gaby Hoffmann.
Move over, Taylor Swift: the tortured poets department has gone back to its rock n roll roots through the soul of Bruce Springsteen. And those roots have been seemingly delivered from nowhere.
Scott Cooper’s new movie Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere uses an uncommon format to look into the process and head space of America’s most raw and revered musician.
Instead of recounting the full span of Springsteen’s life, it focuses on just two key chapters that Springsteen himself credits as crossroads in his career: one being from his childhood, and the other his writing of the 1982 acoustic Nebraska album.
Cooper’s story effectively captures the significance and detail in Springsteen’s work as a poet, musician, businessman and family member. The trouble is there’s inconsistency in how engaging each individual scene, episode and character is or isn’t to the film as a whole.
Jeremy Allen White (best known for TV’s Shameless and Emmy winner The Bear) plays Springsteen with great commitment and grit – even if his guitar playing is less convincing. He’s vulnerable and brooding in a way that feels earned and modest instead of gaslighting, and that tonal balance is critical to the essence of ‘The Boss.’
While White is consistent in his need to bring the sound of Nebraska in its true light to the world, many of the other characters don’t get nearly the same degree of high-stakes objectives to play.
Jeremy Strong is a talented actor, but has very little to do as Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau. He has much less drive and force than his work as Roy Cohn in last year’s The Apprentice.
Similarly, Stephen Graham is harrowing as Bruce’s Dad Douglas, but he has far too little screen time to show variation. Odessa Young is exciting as love interest Faye, but she only has one scene of profound conversation with Bruce.
The tone is appropriate for Bruce’s sound in recounting this yearlong time in his life, but many of the scenes feel disconnected from each other in how they shaped Bruce moving forward.
By far the most successful parts of Deliver Me From Nowhere are the scenes and plot line of Bruce concentrating on writing Nebraska. The film does a great job at depicting the detailed work of crafting an album and story together, from inception to research, writing, recording, mixing and sharing.
It’s rare that a film about the entertainment business shows the reality of editing and repetitiveness of making creative work, like music, exactly right. But Bruce’s dedication to the authenticity of America in his music is part of what makes his songs so special in the first place.
Fans of Springsteen and Allen White and of music history will find the richest rewards in Cooper’s scattershot music history drama. But the best example of what Bruce can do still comes from the albums themselves.
