“Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” was arguably the highest-profile world premiere to debut at the 52nd annual Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend. It was the first time audiences set their sights on Jeremy Allen White’s portrayal of the Bruce Springsteen during a pivotal moment in his music career and represented a big get for Julie Huntsinger, the director of this Colorado-based festival who must fight for her slice of the movie pie against bigger and brasher film festivals: Venice Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival.
Yet, “Deliver Me From Nowhere’” was just one of 35 feature films that transformed the hard-to-reach mountain town into a star-studded confab where you were just as likely to talk hiking trails with Oprah Winfrey as you were to see Stellan Skarsgard crossing the street to get coffee. Or the Iranian director Jafar Panahi smoking a cigarette on the town’s main drag. “I’m on the street because there’s no other place to smoke,” he said.
With Springsteen on hand to help introduce the opening-night film, Huntsinger stepped in front of the microphone and promptly broke down. “I’m so proud that we have this film,” she said through tears to an audience that included Winfrey, Alexander Skarsgard and Noah Baumbach, among others.
It’s understandable that she took such pride in introducing the film, which Disney will release Oct. 24. In a two-week period that began Wednesday and ends Sept. 14, Venice, Telluride and Toronto engage in something akin to a bloody cage match, where each event jockeys for the films with the best potential for Oscar glory, often forcing filmmakers and stars to traverse the globe to appear at more than one prestigious festival.
It can make any festival director feel territorial. Earlier in the day, Huntsinger even engaged in some conspiracy theories related to the Venice premiere on Thursday of Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly,” starring George Clooney and Adam Sandler. The filmmakers’ flights to Colorado were delayed some five hours, preventing the cast from attending the annual welcome brunch. Huntsinger suggested that the planes were grounded as part of some collusion between the festival and the Italian government. Anything, she said, to keep the casts from leaving Italy.
Baumbach did make it to Telluride in time for a tribute to him before a screening of “Jay Kelly” (Netflix), which happens to center on a movie star (Clooney) participating in his own tribute and pondering his decision to prioritize his career over family and personal relationships. The whole exercise put the director in a contemplative mood.
“It’s emotional,” he admitted, adding that he was recently asked if he would recut his old movies, if given the chance. He said he wouldn’t: “However I feel about my movies, it doesn’t matter because that was me then.”
Nothing kept the “Deliver Me From Nowhere” cast from showing up. The director, Scott Cooper, called the production, about Springsteen’s experience making “Nebraska,” his 1982 album, “the most profound, creative experience of my life.” Cooper went on to say that during filming, his home in the Pacific Palisades, Calif., burned down, and Springsteen pulled Cooper’s family out of a hotel and put them up in his house, staying there “until we got back on our feet,” he said.
“That’s who Bruce Springsteen is,” he added. “He’s humble, he’s generous, he’s endlessly supportive.” And then the rock star walked onstage to a standing ovation. When the crowd quieted down, the Boss quipped: “Do I get my house back now?” The movie played a moment later.
Themes from “Deliver Me From Nowhere” echoed throughout the festival, particularly when it came to stories of absent or problematic fathers.
“Hamnet,” the second world premiere of the festival, proved to be a 10-hanky weepie that had audiences reeling. The film, from Focus Features and directed by Chloé Zhao, depicts the grief of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), who lose their son, Hamnet. Ahead of each screening Zhao led the crowd in a three-minute meditation meant to prepare viewers for the experience they were about to have — and something the entire cast did as a daily ritual on set.
“Sentimental Value,” from the director Joachim Trier, also prompted a lot of tears. As his follow-up to “The Worst Person in the World,” the drama, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year and will be released by Neon in the U.S. on Nov. 7, centers on two daughters grappling with their difficult father (played by Skarsgard). “This film is about togetherness, or feeling that it’s hard to be together. It’s about family. It’s about home,” said Trier.
Both films ranked high during informal polling of audiences’ best of, along with “Pillion” (A24), starring Alexander Skarsgard, and “Tuner,” starring Leo Woodall, a film still looking for distribution but one that may become the financier Black Bear’s first self-distributed film.
Even Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” (Netflix) delved into parental abandonment, with the surprise screening Sunday night keeping many audience members up way past their bedtime. Oscar Isaac, the film’s star, was its admittedly very tired emissary, as del Toro stayed back in Venice.
“Guillermo has put his beautiful bleeding Catholic Mexican heart on the slab with this one,” he said to the sold-out crowd.
Ethan Hawke was also the subject of a career retrospective on Saturday. Hawke, who was at the festival both for the biopic “Blue Moon,” in which he plays Lorenz Hart, and for a musical documentary on Merle Haggard that he directed, has spent a lot of his adult life questioning the role of the life of the artist, he said. In addition to Haggard, he has made biopics about the writer Flannery O’Connor and the unsung folk hero Blaze Foley as well as a documentary about the pianist and composer Seymour Bernstein.
He said he was interested in examining why some artists find success and others don’t, a theme echoed in “Blue Moon.”
“Blaze Foley, who’s a wonderful singer-songwriter, was met with a lot of failure. Why?” he asked. “Why failure? Why was this person successful? Why does the world respond this way?”
The state of the world was also on the mind of many filmmakers and films this year. Panahi’s thriller “It was Just an Accident,” which took home the Palme d’Or from Cannes, looks at how people respond to the actions of an oppressive regime, in this case Iran’s.
The director, who has been imprisoned twice in his home country for making films that offend the Islamic regime, had to receive a travel waiver from the U.S., his first time in the country since 2006. “I wasn’t supposed to be here,” he said via the translator Sheida Dayani. “But apparently this is the power of cinema that can bring any dictator to its knees. Doesn’t matter if this dictator is in America or Iran.”
Yorgos Lanthimos was interested in the world of disinformation and conspiracy theories in his gory new thriller, “Bugonia,” starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons. For Stone, the film, about two conspiracy-obsessed men who kidnap a chief executive on the suspicion that she is really an alien sent to destroy humans, felt like an instance of art imitating life. Stone noted that just weeks after the team finished production, the UnitedHealthcare chief executive was killed in Manhattan.
“My God, it just keeps kind of hitting you that the world is so deeply fraught and terrifying in so many ways,” she said.
Nicole Sperling covers Hollywood and the streaming industry. She has been a reporter for more than two decades.
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