Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025)

3 Stars (out of 4)

Like a Boss

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

An exceedingly conventional, mainstream movie about a dark, personal work of art, Scott Cooper's Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere may miss the point, but its sentiments are admirable, and its cast is uniformly great.

Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) has just finished a successful tour, promoting his hit 1980 album The River. He returns to New Jersey, and begins taking inspiration from dark Americana, like the movie Badlands and the stories of Flannery O'Connor.

He meets and starts dating single mom Faye (Odessa Young), but the deeper he gets into his songwriting, the less time he has for others. He asks engineer Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser) for a home four-track recorder and lays down a handful of songs, just Bruce, a guitar, and a harmonica. Bruce asks Mike to add an echo to the songs, making them even more haunting.

The E Street Band begins recording other songs from the sessions, like "Born in the U.S.A." and "I'm on Fire," and the studio begins to think they have another hit on their hands. But the more the band tries to record the other, darker, personal songs, the more Bruce realizes that the demo tape, as is and unchanged, is the next album, to be entitled Nebraska. But he has a fight on his hands to get it released.

Directed by Cooper, who broke through with a similarly vanilla music movie, Crazy Heart (2009), Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere begins by showing black-and-white flashbacks to Bruce's childhood, and to his hard-drinking, somewhat abusive father (Stephen Graham). He's the inspiration for the album, having taken young Bruce to see The Night of the Hunter and driven him to see a literal "mansion on a hill."

The movie does a fine job of capturing a sense of oppressive silence as Bruce leaves behind the cheering crowds and is left alone with his thoughts. A car salesman tells him, "I do know who you are." Bruce replies, "that makes one of us." But the feel of music being created is electrifying, especially a pounding, in-studio performance of "Born in the U.S.A."

From there the movie can't find much to elevate the drama or the romantic subplot, relying on montages and biopic clichés that might be found intact in a spoof like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

When the Nebraska album comes together — on a regular cassette tape without even a box to put it in — it becomes apparent just what a precious object it is, and how difficult it will be to get it out into the world. (Jeremy Strong, playing Bruce's steadfast manager Jon Landau, has some powerful moments in attempting to bridge the gap between artist and corporation.)

Indeed, while most rock biopics are about finding all the right elements for a hit single, the idea of Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, celebrating something difficult, austere, and full of painful searching, may be special after all.