The great surprise of “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” — a solid, very likable, very affecting drama about an anguished period in the life of the young Bruce Springsteen — is that it doesn’t shy away from soul-deep pain. It’s unusual when a movie, particularly from a major studio, just sits with a character’s struggles and lets the pain sit until it bleeds off the screen. Hollywood is a cinema of triumph, and even independent filmmakers like emotional tidiness. It’s rare when a filmmaker doesn’t clean up the messy hurt, the tears and the confusion. Sadness isn’t just a bummer; it seems defeatist, almost un-American.
“Deliver Me From Nowhere” opens in 1981 on a note of thunderous success with Bruce (Jeremy Allen White) finishing up his tour for “The River,” his fifth album and the one that featured his Top 10 hit, “Hungry Heart.” At that point, the singer-songwriter has already snatched the gold ring and been on the covers of Time and Newsweek. His seismic “Born in the U.S.A.” is a few years away. Once off the River Tour, though, Bruce crawls deep in himself only to emerge with his haunted lamentation “Nebraska.” It was a period, as Springsteen writes in his 2016 memoir, “Born to Run,” that was prefaced by his understanding that nobody gets a do-over. There was only forward: “Ahead, into the dark.”
That girding, self-conscious admission expresses the narrative trajectory and spiritual ethos of “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” a portrait film that avoids the pit stops in a typical biopic and is driven by its three terrific male leads. Written and directed by Scott Cooper, it draws from Springsteen’s life — routinely shifting between the soberly colored present and black-and-white flashbacks to his childhood — but it doesn’t try to sum him up or polish his crown. It skips the usual introductions, omits milestones and all but ignores some defining relationships. The E Street Band shows up, mostly as backdrop. A few starry types are also name dropped, largely to thicken the atmosphere and help place the story in its moment.
Most movies about artists fall short, sometimes risibly, even when there’s a real one behind the camera. There’s too much mystery in art, too many unanswered questions, too much ambiguity. American movies insist on action, not action painting, and characters that can deliver something juicy, like a tantrum or a severed ear. There isn’t much obvious excitement in an artist who stares blankly at an empty page or canvas. Cooper embellishes this period in Springsteen’s life, but, at heart, this is a movie about a man who makes music alone in the shadow of his past and especially that of his father, Doug (Stephen Graham). And then Bruce heads West, falling into a despair as dark and deep as the world he’d just chronicled.
Cooper has based the movie on Warren Zanes’s 2023 nonfiction book “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” an absorbing, focused chronicle about how Springsteen came to make “Nebraska.” The book is rooted in Springsteen’s process, in the labor and in other tangibles, like the small Jersey bedroom where he recorded what he initially thought were demos and the four-track cassette machine he used, one bought at a store. But Zanes is also sensitive to the mysteries that turn a work that contains identifiable elements — words, notes, history, a wailing harmonica, a confessional narrative — into a work of art of transporting, ineffable power. (Zanes is a musician turned author, and a former guitarist for the band the Del Fuegos.)
Using the book as his frame, Cooper starts his version after Bruce exits the stage on the last night of the River Tour and mops his head dry. He’s 31, and wrung out. His friend and manager, Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), is waiting for him with a tentative smile, and there’s a journalist somewhere hoping for a word. Everyone wants a piece of Bruce, although it’s unclear from the blasted-out, dazed look on his face that he has anything left to give. He soon rents a pretty house in a wooded pocket of Colts Neck, N.J., and then Cooper begins tracking the breadcrumb trail that Zanes writes about, a trail that takes a turn when Bruce snaps on the TV to discover Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” and its homegrown killers.
Cooper takes predictable liberties in telling this story, some more successful than others. He mostly omits the larger social and political backdrop (Bruce listens to the band Suicide, but I don’t remember seeing Howard Zinn on a shelf), and focuses on the more personal parts of Springsteen’s life. These include a romance with a young mother, Faye (Odessa Young), a composite that Cooper uses mostly to say something about Bruce, women and repressed hurt. She and Bruce meet one night outside the Stone Pony, a bar in Asbury Park where he sometimes jumps onstage to play with the house band. He’s famous enough that guys in passing cars call out his name (“Bruuuuce!”), but his celebrity doesn’t get in the way of hanging out at an arcade or playing pretend family with a pretty woman and her little girl.
Cooper likes dark stories and palettes, and he’s partial to homespun dramas about broken dreams and men. His films include “Crazy Heart,” with Jeff Bridges as an alcoholic country singer, and “Out of the Furnace,” a powerfully acted Rust Belt dirge with Christian Bale. As a director, Cooper tends to soften and over-buff the rough edges that he’s drawn to; he can over-aestheticize the grit. Here, he also periodically edges into the kind of monumentalizing register that filmmakers can fall into when dealing with history and its renowned players. Springsteen has long loomed over the American landscape but not like a stone colossus from far on high, and Cooper’s essential challenge in this movie isn’t the legend but the man.
There are frustrating moments in “Deliver Me From Nowhere” — that lyric appears to great effect in “Nebraska” — and some unfortunate self-conscious arty flourishes, but there’s much to like here, too. As a director, Cooper’s strength is both his sincerity (he believes, so you try to as well) and in his work with actors. The screenwriter part of him routinely overloads the narrative with too many expository passages, and Strong’s character in particular has way too much explaining to do. In one needless scene squarely aimed at the audience, Jon shares his worries with his wife (Grace Gummer), a character so thin he might as well be talking to a lamp (or himself). The women in this movie don’t fare all that well, though Gaby Hoffmann as Bruce’s mother, Adele, adds illuminating desperation to the story.
White, who’s best known from the FX series “The Bear,” doesn’t look like Springsteen and smartly, he and Cooper don’t try to fake a resemblance. Much like the man he plays, though, White has tremendous charisma and the kind of endlessly interesting face whose rough beauty and asymmetry draws you to him. His Bruce spends a fair amount of time by himself, and doesn’t speak the language of the therapeutically schooled. That means White needs to express the seemingly inexpressible, even as the character is finding the songs that will voice what he can’t, which the actor does with delicacy. In a movie filled with music that says so much to so many, some of the most memorable moments are the quieter ones, the lonely silences that at times separate Bruce from the world but also eventually help him return to it.
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
Rated PG-13 for language. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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