No one notices Bruce Springsteen.
He makes no effort to hide—black T-shirt, blue jeans, Wayfarer sunglasses, honky-tonk cowboy boots—but for a few minutes, the most famous son of the Jersey Shore achieves a kind of anonymity, even in the one place his sudden appearance seems most plausible: the Asbury Park boardwalk. Passing Madam Marie’s, the fortune teller immortalized in his 1973 ballad “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” I suggest that if people look for him anywhere, it’s here. Springsteen chuckles, recalling a T-shirt sold in local shops: i heard bruce might show up.
Soon, we discover what happens when he does. Near the Convention Hall, a double take becomes a selfie request. More follow. A restaurant owner begs him to stay for dinner. Outside the Bruce Springsteen Archives store, a cashier leaps up in delight, serendipitously wearing the very shirt we had just been discussing. “My cloak of invisibility is rapidly fading,” Springsteen says, half-amused, half-resigned. We find refuge in an empty Stone Pony, the fabled club that launched his career, where we spent the afternoon talking about his life and legacy. As for the crowd he slips into a car to leave behind, he says, “I always took it as just part of the job.”
For a half-century, Springsteen’s job has been unlike any other. He has released 21 albums, collecting 20 Grammys, an Oscar, a Tony, the Kennedy Center Honors, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He’s written a best-selling memoir, recorded a podcast with Barack Obama, and sold more than 150 million records worldwide. He’s one of the most in-demand live performers on earth, commanding crowds who embrace him with something close to religious devotion. His most recent tour grossed more than $700 million—the largest haul of his career, eclipsing the Born in the U.S.A. juggernaut of the ’80s.
But the story of Springsteen is more than the scale of his success. He occupies a rarefied place in American life, maintaining an authenticity rare for a performer of his reach, even as he grapples with the contradictions of his existence. Springsteen is a tribune for the working class who became fabulously rich; a restless outsider who is a rooted family man; and the rock star who has seemingly everything but still wrestles with shadows he cannot shake. As the stages grew larger—from clubs to theaters, arenas to stadiums—Springsteen chose not to disguise the distance between the man onstage and the man in the mirror, but to make it part of the art itself.
Now Springsteen, 76, has undertaken another daring move: surrendering control to a team of filmmakers to tell the story of the most vulnerable period of his life. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, in theaters Oct. 24, chronicles the making of Nebraska, his 1982 acoustic masterpiece. Jeremy Allen White plays Springsteen; Jeremy Strong portrays his longtime manager Jon Landau. The film captures a sliver of his early 30s, when he was battling his first bout of serious depression, compulsively driving past his childhood home, and eventually seeking therapy, a step Springsteen credits with saving his life. “It could have gone in a lot of different directions,” he says.
That crucible altered the trajectory of his career, sharpening the themes that have fueled his music since—a starker portrait of America, an insistence on dignity for the marginalized, redemption for the broken, the possibility of salvation in community—while allowing him to remain both uncompromising and commercially viable. Just as significant, it led him to embrace family life: the responsibilities and joys so often elusive for rock stars. “The show-business life is wonderful if it’s part of a larger life,” says Landau, his closest confidant. “If it becomes a substitute for life, that’s the danger zone.”
After the boardwalk, Springsteen returns to his home studio in Colts Neck, a 10 minute drive from where he grew up. Fifty years after Born to Run, he may be associated with getting out, but his life has been defined by sticking around. “What I worked very hard on was not running, but on standing, on making your life choices, and then standing with and for them,” he says. “That’s been my theme since that record.” If the heroes of Born to Run found their glory in flight, Springsteen has since offered the counter-vision: that to stay put, to face your own demons head on, is its own form of heroism.
On a gray October afternoon in 2023, Springsteen opened the door of a rented Jersey Shore cottage and ushered three men inside to discuss something he’d long resisted: a film about his life.
Springsteen had invited Scott Cooper, director of brooding films such as Crazy Heart and Out of the Furnace; Warren Zanes, author of the definitive book on Nebraska; and Landau, serving what he claimed were Philly cheesesteaks. “These were not cheesesteaks,” Zanes remembers. “This was really good steak on artisanal bread with exquisite cheese.”
From the outset, Springsteen was drawn to Cooper’s vision—not a cradle-to-the-grave biopic but a compact character study. “This narrow time frame reveals deeper truths about Bruce’s lifelong struggles with identity and creative honesty,” Cooper says. Hardly anyone expected Springsteen to say yes. But with age, Springsteen says, he’s become more willing to agree to proposals he once dismissed. “I’m old. I don’t give a f-ck what I do anymore!” he says with a grin. “As you get older, you feel a lot freer.”
Springsteen recounts the process in a dimly lit Stone Pony. He became a fixture here around his 1975 breakout Born to Run. He was on a three-record deal with Columbia, and though his first two were praised by critics, they disappointed commercially, and the label shifted its attention to Billy Joel. At risk of being cast aside, Springsteen shed the rhyme-drunk ballads of his earlier work. He barely had a driver’s license but understood what cars represented to a country rattled by the oil embargo: gas prices had soared, and an ordinary symbol of American freedom suddenly felt precarious. If gas was too expensive, you couldn’t drive. If you couldn’t drive, you lost your agency. “I didn’t know a lot about cars,” he says, “but I knew what they meant. It was simply my metaphor.”
Born to Run fused the street-level detail of Dylan with the operatic grandeur of Phil Spector. Its opening track, “Thunder Road,” is a summons: the singer beckons Mary into his car, a chance to flee “a town full of losers” for a better life. “Jungleland,” the nine-minute finale, stages the saga of the Magic Rat and the barefoot girl, who slip across Jersey into Harlem only to see their dreams collapse. Critics hailed Born to Run as a crowning achievement, something both sui generis and revitalizing. The counterculture had curdled, Vietnam was over but unsettled, and the economy sagged into stagflation. Into that drift came a wiry kid from Freehold, N.J., who made the ordinary seem mythic. “It was a magical group of things and circumstances that helped deliver this guy and deliver Columbia’s dream,” says Springsteen’s first manager Mike Appel.
On Oct. 20, 1975, Springsteen appeared on the covers of TIME and Newsweek—a feat once reserved for Presidents, Popes, or astronauts. For Springsteen, holed up at the Sunset Marquis for a four-night stand at the Roxy, it felt like a curse. “It’s making you very, very different than all the people you grew up with,” he says. Success was both exhilarating and terrifying; his sister Pam recalls paparazzi peering into their parents’ kitchen. Springsteen and his circle worried about the “hype,” a toxic word that suggested the deflators weren’t far behind. What haunted him even more was how fame might change him. “It’s a very distorted lens to live your life through,” he says. “You have to be very protective of yourself, of what matters dearly to you.”
With 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen planted his feet with those who never made it out—using his songs to speak to someone he could not otherwise reach. He turned toward the working class, sketching figures who resembled his father—the stoic men of “Factory,” the dreamers of “Racing in the Street.”
Douglas Springsteen was taciturn, drifting through jobs he could never keep—cabdriver, prison guard—and prone to rages and long silences, staying up late with beer and cigarettes. He was emotionally absent from his three children—Bruce, Virginia, and Pam—and especially hard on his son, never once saying he loved him. The family’s mediator and breadwinner, the one who carried its optimism and kept it afloat, was Bruce’s mother Adele, who worked as a legal secretary. (Bruce says now that his bleak songs came from his father whereas his joyous ones—“Rosalita,” “Out in the Street”—came from his mother.) For a working-class man in the 1950s, seeking psychiatric care meant defying social mores. Only decades later was Doug Springsteen diagnosed as bipolar and schizophrenic—enabling him to get the help he needed. But Bruce would always fear that the strain of mental illness running through his family might one day ensnare him.
Springsteen’s next record, The River, veered toward connection. “For a long time, I did not write any love songs,” he says. “I figured other people were taking care of it. I was interested in other topics, and I simply didn’t know what it was.” The album produced his first Billboard Top 10 single, “Hungry Heart,” and the verdict at Columbia was clear: Springsteen was on the brink of superstardom.
This is where the film Deliver Me From Nowhere begins. After The River Tour, Springsteen plunged into psychic free fall. Instead of chasing hits, he retreated to a house in Colts Neck with a four-track recorder. What emerged was Nebraska: a desolate gallery of outlaws, killers, and lost souls. After Springsteen laid several tracks for what would become 1984’s Born in the U.S.A., which everyone knew was lightning in a bottle, he took a break to record demos on a cassette with the plan of recreating them in the studio with the E Street Band. But the more they rerecorded them, the more Springsteen hated it, so he decided to release the tapes as they were. When Nebraska came out on Sept. 30, 1982, Springsteen let the music speak for itself—no interviews, no tour.
He then took a road trip out west and had a breakdown, but in therapy found reconciliation—with both his past and with his father, played in the film by Stephen Graham. “My father was a tough guy,” Springsteen says. “He was tough when he was young. He was tough on me when I was young, but fundamentally, underneath, he was a vulnerable, fragile, sweet-hearted, and soulful man. I think you see that part of him at the end of the film.” When the movie debuted at the Telluride Film Festival, the reviews were glowing. Already, the film is generating Oscar buzz.
To play the role, White spent hours studying Springsteen—listening to his memoir on tape, watching old interviews—but knew to avoid imitation. He doesn’t adopt Springsteen’s twang but embodies him psychologically. They first met at a sound check in London’s Wembley Stadium last year and cultivated a friendship. White says he made a pact with Springsteen, Landau, and Cooper: “Let’s make a movie about a musician during this period in his life that just so happens to be Bruce Springsteen.”
If anyone saw Springsteen clearly in this period, it was Landau—portrayed in the film with uncanny precision by Strong. (When he phoned Thom Zimny, Springsteen’s longtime filmmaker, to request archival footage, Strong was still in character, Zimny tells me—method to the core.) Their relationship forms the film’s emotional spine, elevating it into a love story. After Nebraska’s release, Springsteen considered suicide. Landau told him plainly, “You need professional help.” The next day, the manager got the star into a therapist’s office. “It was and has been a total life changer,” Springsteen says.
After his therapist of 25 years died, Springsteen kept going. “When I walked into a new therapist’s office,” he says, “I had a lot more information than when I first walked into Dr. Myers’ and said, ‘I don’t have a home, I don’t have a partner, I don’t have a life beyond my work, and those are things that I want.’”
The film also portrays a dalliance between Springsteen and Odessa Young’s “Faye,” a composite of several relationships meant to capture his fleeting romances as he began to crave commitment. “It might have been my own biological clock,” he tells me. “I was in my early 30s, and you start thinking about, Hey, where is my everything?”
On the Born in the U.S.A. tour, Springsteen invited singer and guitarist Patti Scialfa to join the E Street Band. It was 1984, and the album ruled the charts, its singles dominated MTV, and he would soon marry actor Julianne Phillips. But Scialfa’s arrival shifted everything. They had met nearly a decade earlier at the Stone Pony, and Springsteen remembers the exact spot. In fact, we’re sitting in it. “I met Patti right in this chair,” he says, recalling the moment with clarity: Scialfa stepping down from the stage, her voice still ringing in the room. “I went, Who is that gorgeous redhead singing like Ronnie Spector or Dusty Springfield?” he says. Springsteen introduced himself, and the rest, he says with a smile, “has been the rest.”
Toward the end of the decade, his marriage to Phillips ended, his partnership with Scialfa blossomed, and his music veered inward. Tunnel of Love, released in 1987, explored intimacy and the fragility of relationships. “Walk Like a Man,” among his most piercing songs, begins with a child tracing his father’s footsteps in the sand and ends with a groom at the altar, weighing which parts of his old man’s heritage to carry forward and which to leave behind. In 1991, he married Scialfa. “I knew she saw me for who I really was,” he says. “A complicated, messy person. I didn’t have to pretend. I was broken. She was broken in her own way, and we were each other’s personal projects.”
On the eve of their first child’s birth, Springsteen’s father drove hours to see him in Los Angeles. Over 11 a.m. beers, Doug told him: “You’ve been very good to us, and I wasn’t very good to you.” The frank admission was his “greatest gift to me,” Bruce says. “He had the fortitude and the wherewithal and the deep understanding that I was about to become a father, and he didn’t want me to make the same mistakes.” Soon after, Bruce wrote “Living Proof,” a song about the astonishment of becoming a parent—a declaration of transformation and renewal. Two more children followed. All three, now grown, are near the age he was when he made Nebraska.
Fatherhood ended Springsteen’s days of running. “Two of the best days of my life,” he once told Rolling Stone, “were the day I picked up the guitar and the day that I learned to put it down.” When I remind him, he smiles: “That’s good. I’ll stand by that.” The guitar, he explains, was his first form of self-medication. “It was the only way I knew how to handle my problems, and it was the instrument I went to when I felt myself in a lot of psychological or personal difficulties.”
But to lean on it for everything, he says, is “an abuse of the work, an abuse of the instrument.” Music could carry him through the ecstasy of live performance, but beyond that, “You’ve got to find a bigger life,” he says. “The day you pick it up, that’s the three hours onstage. The day you put it down, that’s the other 21.”
Before stepping onto a Manchester, England, stage on May 14, Springsteen gathered the band for their usual ritual, but instead of his familiar pep talk, he offered a warning: “Might get a little heavy tonight,” he said. “We’ll see.”
Minutes later, he delivered a searing monologue that ricocheted across the world: “In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous Administration,” he said. Only two people knew in advance: Landau, who saw the speech and told him to change “not a word,” and the teleprompter operator. “He mentioned he was going to do a monologue,” recalls saxophonist Jake Clemons, his bandmate and nephew of the late Clarence Clemons, Springsteen’s beloved original saxophonist. “We didn’t know what it was until we were onstage.”
For the European tour, Springsteen revised his set list, swapping meditations on mortality from his 2020 album Letter to You for fierce political resistance—beginning with “Land of Hope and Dreams,” his gospel-infused anthem of inclusion and redemption, and closing with Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom,” a hymn of solidarity with the oppressed. “He just got pissed off enough to want to change the theme,” longtime E Street guitarist Steven Van Zandt says. It was a few months into Donald Trump’s norm-shattering second term, and Springsteen was among the first artists of his stature to speak out so forcefully. “If I’m going to stay true to who I’ve tried to be,” he tells me, “I can’t give these guys a free pass.” Politics had long shadowed him: to his fury, “Born in the U.S.A.,” a protest against the neglect of Vietnam veterans, was hijacked by Ronald Reagan and recast as a flag-saluting celebration. “To understand that song,” he says, “you’ve got to hold two contradictory thoughts at once: that you can feel betrayed by your country and still love it.”
Over the years, he has returned to political and social themes, from the AIDS epidemic and the plight of migrant workers, to deindustrialization and the ravages of war. Critics have mocked the irony of a rock star traveling by private jet while singing about the working poor. He owns the contradiction—“a rich man in a poor man’s shirt,” as he writes in “Better Days.” Today, the joke is old, but something else haunts him: the very people he sings about have flocked to Trump. “A lot of people bought into his lies,” he says. “He doesn’t care about the forgotten anybody but himself and the multibillionaires who stood behind him on Inauguration Day.” Springsteen struggles with another truth: “You have to face the fact that a good number of Americans are simply comfortable with his politics of power and dominance.”
After Springsteen’s speech, Trump called him “highly overrated” and posted a meme depicting himself striking the rocker with a golf ball. When I bring this up, Springsteen laughs. “I absolutely couldn’t care less what he thinks about me.” What he doesn’t laugh about is the state of the nation. “He’s the living personification of what the 25th Amendment and impeachment were for. If Congress had any guts, he’d be consigned to the trash heap of history.” Nor does he spare Democrats: “We’re desperately in need of an effective alternative party, or for the Democratic Party to find someone who can speak to the majority of the nation. There is a problem with the language that they’re using and the way they’re trying to reach people.”
Springsteen has spent decades exploring the gulf between the American Dream and the American reality, the widening economic divides that would power Trump’s rise: from the hollowing out of Rust Belt cities, conjured in his 1984 song “My Hometown,” to the populist rage of his 2012 album about the Great Recession, Wrecking Ball. “Those conditions are ripe for a demagogue,” he says. “Those things have got to be addressed if we want to live in the America of our better angels. I still believe it’s there, but it’s struggling.”
During that brief stretch on the boardwalk when we elude recognition, Springsteen steers me toward the spot on the beach where he and the E Street Band performed a year earlier. “One of our top five shows of all time for me,” he says of the Sea.Hear.Now festival. The waves crashed behind the stage, as fans—including myself—stood barefoot in the sand. Springsteen crafted a unique set list, reaching back for early deep cuts from when he was still finding his voice—“Blinded by the Light,” “Thunder Crack.” The climax struck when he performed Born to Run’s final two songs: “Meeting Across the River” into “Jungleland.” The moment snuck up on Springsteen. “I didn’t realize how symbolic it was going to be for me,” he says. “The town over the past 10 to 15 years returned from the dead. We were here when it was empty and barren.” Here was proof of resurrection: a city revived, a community of fans built over half a century, the arc from isolation to communion—the inverse of the spiritual solitude in which Nebraska was born.
When I ask whether he will tour with the E Street Band again, he doesn’t hesitate. “Of course!” A solo tour is also a possibility, but nothing is planned. “I just want to keep going,” he tells me. “I want to make records that deal with subjects people haven’t heard me deal with yet.”
In the meantime, he offers other treasures. For years, he had denied the existence of Electric Nebraska—full-band versions of the songs he first cut on cassette in 1982. But one day curiosity got the better of him, and he found the tapes in his archives. The sessions will be released this fall, timed with the new film. Tracks 3, another collection of unreleased material, is slated for two or three years from now. Springsteen keeps the details close but lets one out: it will include his famously slow, hypnotic cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Want You.”
Today his days follow a simple rhythm: wake up, work out, head to the studio, spend the evenings with Scialfa—who has been battling blood cancer since 2018—reading, watching TV, and listening to music. He just finished Moby Dick, and the young artists he admires are Zach Bryan and boygenius.
New music of his own is on the way. To continue a conversation with his fans, he says, each album must represent something new. “The first thing that really reaches the public is the thing they tend to hold on to and want you to hold on to,” he explains. “What the writer has to do is you write yourself into a box, and then you’re Houdini. You continue your work until you feel yourself locked in that bigger box, then you’re supposed to escape into a bigger box.”
He remembers the mid-’70s, playing to a small crowd in a dingy New York City club after the sensation of Born to Run. A friend, baffled, asked, “What are you doing here?” Springsteen had an answer in his mind. “I was just building my little house a block at a time,” he says. “I wasn’t out of the basement yet, but I knew I wanted a career that would live and grow with my audience.” To Springsteen, the Asbury Park concert was the culmination of that long construction project. “I feel that the band kept faith with its audience, worked hard to be at its best, never went onstage without playing like it was the last night on earth.”
But those are the three hours. The other 21 remain his life’s work. At a show in the 1990s, Springsteen performed “My Father’s House,” a harrowing song from Nebraska. The narrator dreams of embracing his estranged father, only to wake, drive to the old home, and find a stranger at the door. His father has vanished, their sins lie unatoned, the hope of reconciliation lost. Onstage, Springsteen framed it with a story from therapy. He confessed to his habit of circling his childhood home.
“Something bad happened,” Dr. Myers told him. “You’re going back, thinking you can make it right again.”
“That is what I’m doing,” Springsteen replied.
“Well,” Dr. Myers said, “you can’t.”
When I ask how he absorbed the insight, how he put it into practice, Springsteen pauses. “Well, I don’t know,” he says. “I still drive by that house.”
The post Bruce Springsteen’s Long Journey Home appeared first on TIME.
