If you’ve seen any trailers for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, you have every right to expect a high-octane biopic of the legendary New Jersey rocker. Especially because the majority of them boast long snippets of a “Born to Run” performance at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium, where Jeremy Allen White leans into the Boss’s on-stage hallmarks: his exhausted, screaming voice, crouched stance, and sweat-soaked hair. Like one of his sold-out concerts, it’s loud, exciting, and alive, capturing him at the height of his powers.
But those adrenalized teasers belie Scott Cooper’s new movie, which opts out of offering a comprehensive biography set to career-spanning karaoke, and instead documents a much quieter but pivotal moment in its subject’s life. Specifically, it follows the contours of Warren Zane’s eponymous book, telling the creation story of Springsteen’s unplugged 1982 album Nebraska. In the afterglow of his hugely successful album tour for The River, Springsteen retreats to his empty Colts Neck, N.J., home and confronts the demons of his past, composing a series of stripped-down, introspective folk songs (recorded in his bedroom on a four-track player) that channel his newfound isolation and burgeoning depression.
Now considered one of Springsteen’s most important albums, Nebraska initially played as a direct affront to Columbia Records label executives, who were eager for him to continue churning out mainstream radio anthems. They didn’t know how to market his haunting poetry or his distorted music, which crackled and echoed without a producer’s touch, nor did he have any desire to promote it himself. (Despite the label execs’ misgivings, Nebraska would outperform expectations and become a treasured classic.) As the movie details in two distinct timelines, the album evokes all of Springsteen’s inner turmoil and complicated relationships—with himself, his father, his romantic interests, and his loyal manager—and packages them into something raw and authentic.
To better understand this challenging, reflective time in his life, here’s more background on the movie’s most influential characters—some real, some fictional—whose presence and history inspired Springsteen’s most daring and revered musical endeavor.
Read more: Bruce Springsteen’s Long Journey Home
Douglas Springsteen
In his 2017 concert residency “Springsteen on Broadway,” the rocker describes his father as “my hero” and “my greatest foe.” That complicated, paradoxical dynamic is the emotional center of Nebraska and Cooper’s movie, which unpacks Bruce’s childhood and relationship with his father through a series of beautifully rendered black-and-white flashbacks. As portrayed by Stephen Graham, Douglas was a World War II veteran and blue-collar worker who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia late in his adult life. This led to an unstable household in which father-son conversations often led to screaming matches and erratic behavior, some of which Cooper captures—in scenes set both in their Freehold, N.J., home and during a manic night in Los Angeles, where Douglas and his wife, Adele (Gaby Hoffman), moved while Bruce was a teenager.
In many ways, Nebraska is an album reckoning with his father’s mental health struggles, heavy drinking, verbal abuse, and ignorance toward the family. Left unexamined for too long, Springsteen’s childhood trauma boils over upon his return to New Jersey, and songwriting becomes the primary outlet to process his past. Despite penning many songs about his struggles, Bruce later presented a fuller portrait of Douglas (who died in 1998) in his 2016 memoir Born to Run, recalling some of their fishing adventures together and sharing regrets about his ornery behavior the day his father made him tour his Navy ship during a stop along the Jersey shore.
The movie ends with a moment of reconciliation, when Bruce greets his father after a concert and shares a few words with him. “I’m really proud of you,” he tells Bruce. “I know I wasn’t always good to you.” As Bruce sits in his father’s lap for the first time, he accepts his apology. “You did the best you could,” he tells him.
Read more: Jeremy Allen White Beautifully Channels a Lost Rock Star in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
Adele Springsteen
In one of the movie’s brief flashback scenes, Bruce’s mother, Adele, turns on the living room radio and begins to dance with her son. It’s a temporary escape from her husband’s depressive mental illness and abusive behavior, as well as a window into Adele’s eternal love of music, one that would sustain Bruce’s spirit and influence his eventual career.
As documented in his Broadway show, Adele played lots of Top 40 radio as Bruce grew up, singing and dancing throughout the house and eventually renting him his first electric guitar when he was 7 years old. The Brooklyn native worked as a legal secretary and raised Bruce and his two younger sisters in Freehold, bringing a sense of stability to the family structure. When Bruce began touring and selling out arenas, Adele became famous for dancing with her son on stage—including at 90 years old, during a show in 2016.
In his memoir, Bruce remembers her in a multitude of ways: “My mom was truthfulness, consistency, good humor, professionalism, grace, kindness, optimism, civility, fairness, pride in yourself, responsibility, love, faith in your family, commitment, joy in your work and a never-say-die thirst for living and life… and most importantly for dancing.” Though she struggled with Alzheimer’s until her death in 2024, she remained vivacious, supportive, and eager to move her body to music around her son. “That need to dance is something that hasn’t left her,” Springsteen said in his Broadway show. “She can’t speak. She can’t stand. But when she sees me, there’s a smile.”
Faye Romano
While most of the figures in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere are real, Bruce’s romantic interest, Faye Romano (Odessa Young), is a fictional character, based on several of the rock star’s girlfriends at the time. As she notes in an interview with Stylist, Young took a few cues from Springsteen’s memoir to prepare for the role, but didn’t lean on details from any specific girlfriends in Springsteen’s past to allow them privacy. “I didn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize that in any way,” she says. “It wasn’t expected of me to model this person on something real, so I had a lot of creative freedom with Faye.”
Young’s grounded performance keeps the relationship from being merely a plot device, but Faye’s romantic subplot is mostly a window into Springsteen’s inner conflict and emotional unavailability. After getting through that more volatile period in his life, Springsteen eventually settled down and married actress and model Julianne Phillips in 1985. When their relationship ended after four years, he remarried, wedding Patti Scialfa, a member of the E Street Band, in 1991. The pair raised three kids and have been together ever since. “I knew she saw me for who I really was,” Springsteen told TIME recently. “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.”
Jon Landau
In 1974, before he became his manager, Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) was a music critic singing Springsteen’s praises. He’d just attended a concert in Cambridge, Mass., where Springsteen and the E Street Band opened for Bonnie Raitt, and Landau could see the future. “On a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time,” Landau wrote for The Real Paper. After attending another concert later that year, Landau laid out his vision for Bruce’s path to superstardom and eventually joined his management team as a co-producer. Four years later, Landau became his full-time manager, starting a long and fruitful creative partnership.
When the movie picks up in 1981, Landau has taken on a number of roles, becoming Springesteen’s “manager, mentor, confidante and therapist,” as Scott Cooper told Deadline. Unlike a host of seedy managers looking to make a quick buck, Landau had real care and compassion for Springsteen. He supported his friend’s artistic vision, fought to keep his songs acoustic on Nebraska, and maintained solidarity when the record label balked at his musical pivot. Landau also understood that Springsteen needed to address his own mental health issues with a professional and encouraged him to seek help after the rocker experienced an emotional breakdown. Throughout the movie, Strong exudes this fraternal bond on screen in small, intimate ways, exhibiting the grace that Landau had for Springsteen when the artist needed it the most.
The pair would continue to collaborate and find professional success, most immediately with Springsteen’s 1984 album Born in the U.S.A., before parting ways professionally in 1992. Over the last three decades, Landau has gone on to produce for artists like Natalie Merchant and Shania Twain, eventually earning him an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020. “He created a management style based not just on the business but also on nurturing the highest artistic goals along with personal growth,” Springsteen said at his induction ceremony. “No one did that before Jon Landau—and I don’t think anyone’s done it since.”
The post The Real Stories Behind the Key People in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere appeared first on TIME.
