One of the things that was really bad about the Timothée Chalamet Bob Dylan movie from 2024 is that its makers seemed desperate to toady up to the big man by framing his every creative decision as a check mate it some culture-anticipating 9D game of chess. It’s a film that is packed with shots of people looking at Bob Dylan with an expression that gives, “I have encountered a songwriting genius, I will never amount to anything.”
On its most basic level, Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere earns a passing grade for doing the standard-issue rock biog thing, but dialling down the earthly deity hagiography stuff, presenting instead The Boss at a juncture of mental turmoil and confusion. It’s refreshing to see him make decisions that aren’t filled with pop cultural portent, and be selfish in a way that’s human rather than calculated for some bigger mythmaking end game. This may sound like faint praise, but it’s quite rare in these types of films, especially those with the artist’s involvement.
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The story here sees Springsteen – or “Brooooooooooooce” as he is known to his legions of fans – in a transitional moment in his career, on the cusp of international superstardom but choosing to step back from the precipice at the final second while he still has the option and wherewithal to do so. The success of double album The River in 1980 allowed Springsteen and his E Street Band to be blasted through radios across the land with its mix of fist-pumping choruses and exhilarating musicality.
But rather than travel that train further down the line towards the career-defining statement that was Born in the USA, he chose instead to strip back his craft to its very core, creating a solo album, all alone with a four track in the bedroom of a sleepy New Jersey suburb. The album Nebraska is now thought of as one of the most remarkable and innovative artistic statements of the 1980s, and many – this writer included – chalk it up as Springsteen’s defining achievement as a writer and performer who was focused on the novelistic possibilities of the album format.
Jeremy Allen White slinks into the checked work-shirt of Springsteen, and it’s a dour performance that omits much of the down home, easygoing charm that Springsteen is known for. Of course, this film covers a little-known and intimate period in his life, yet there’s an aspect of alienation to see a version of such a well-known personality that has so little connection to his public persona – whether that’s projected or authentic.
Running alongside the practical process of recording Nebraska, which includes a few scenes with Mr Film Stealer himself Paul Walter Hauser as goofy recording engineer Mike Batlan, is a romantic subplot involving waitress/single mom Faye (Odessa Young) who headbangs along to his sets at rock club The Stone Pony. It’s a calling-card performance from Young, who transmits an authentic, lived-in sense of melancholy and tenderness in her performance, and the film suffers when their burgeoning romances dissipates and Springsteen eventually opts to drift away from her.
Jeremy Strong is back doing robust character work as Springsteen’s manager, John Landau, who both facilitates his boss’s artistic leanings – however esoteric – while also talking him down from a few emotional ledges. It’s an entertaining turn that almost feels a little rote for someone like Strong who now seems to only gravitate towards these types of roles.
Where the film suffers is in its lack of a coherent dramatic arc, as it instead chronicles a chunk of time that marks a confluence of small epiphanies and aching fallbacks. Writer/director Cooper plays thing very safe creatively, crowbaring in all the relevant muso history while punctuating proceedings with flashbacks and digressions which are framed as Americana-tinged fantasies direct from a Springsteen lyric. It’s a gentle, sadness-tinged time at the moments, and if nothing else will introduce a whole new generation to the transcendent beauty of Nebraska.
