Bruce Springsteen was 6 years old when Bill Haley & His Comets released “Rock Around the Clock,” the first broadly popular rock’n’roll song. Thanks to the song’s inclusion in the 1955 movie Blackboard Jungle, rock music entered the American consciousness with its visual identity and mythos already set. You didn’t simply listen to this music or dance to it. Blackboard Jungle introduced rock’n’roll as a wild, rebellious force, one that could energize a young person so completely they would be able to see through the bullshit world of school, chores, grades, and all the other phoniness against which Holden Caulfield had raged only four years prior. Had “Rock Around the Clock” been simply a radio hit, with no visual and extramusical affect around it, who knows what the last 70 years might have looked like.
Springsteen grew up alongside rock’n’roll, absorbing its origin story and waiting for the day when his ability to write a killer riff would transport him from the misery of living with a father who didn’t understand him, shut off from a world that promised so much but gave so little. Listen to the eight-minute version of “Growin’ Up” recorded live at the Roxy in 1978, where Roy Bittan tinkles around on the piano while Springsteen tells a story that makes no real logical sense—something about being in a car wreck and his lawyer hating him and his dad only ever calling it a “goddamned guitar,” his mom wanting him to be an author. The story is obviously not true, or at least it doesn’t matter if it is, because he rounds into something like an emotional truth. “Well, what they didn’t understand is, I wanted everything,” he says. To his parents, who were apparently in the room that night in West Hollywood, he adds, “Tonight, youse are both just gonna have to settle for rock’n’roll.” Cue the music.
No artist has been so shaped by—and gone on to shape—the idea that rock music can save your life than Bruce Springsteen did from his 1973 debut Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. to his first masterpiece, 1975’s Born to Run. It’s not surprising that his story would make its way to the big screen, where it, too, can be shaped into a proper myth through the narrative power of the biopic. Another story of superhuman triumph in the face of hostility and bosses who just don’t get it (those damned label execs!), another rock star who’s just like you and me—only he’s been set free by the mighty power of rock’n’roll. The Springsteen version of this story has been widely available since at least the release of 1986 box set Live 1975-85, a five-LP collection that sold 13 million copies whose between-song banter (including that “Growin’ Up”) often plays into the narrative critic Jon Landau set into motion when he famously wrote, “I have seen rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.”
This is not the film that director Scott Cooper wanted to make. Nor is it the film Springsteen himself, who hung around the set as an informal adviser, wanted to be told. “You’ve got to deliver a Scott Cooper movie that doesn’t sand off the edges,” the Boss reportedly said, mandating a film “that doesn’t let the audience off the hook, and that shows me in my most vulnerable period.”
Cooper, who made his debut with the 2009 washed-up country star drama Crazy Heart, knows that the rise to fame is rarely as interesting as the effect that fame has on the artist. Rather than focus on sordid affairs, out-of-control addictions, or self-destructive behavior—the things musician biopics are made of—Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere sidesteps rock’n’roll sensationalism entirely. Instead, it focuses on the making of the 1982 album Nebraska, a famously dark and, by the standards of its day, anti-commercial collection of echoey murder ballads and dead-end dreams recorded onto a literal cassette tape and run through an echoplex.
Like the album, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is an uncharacteristically small and unconventional film, even as it’s still recognizably a biopic. We get only one clip of Springsteen—played with lived-in grace by Jeremy Allen White—leading the E Street Band on stage, and it comes in the film’s opening ten minutes. It’s a stunning, remarkably effective piece of concert filmmaking that captures the giddy energy exchange between performer and audience, the crowd’s voices nearly as loud as Springsteen’s as they rev through the climax of “Born to Run.” It makes seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert seem like it might be the best thing a person could possibly do. The clip then smash-cuts to a scene of Bruce as a child listening to his parents fight in the next room, and we’re meant to understand that the joy and power that steams off of the stage is a cure for the pain of childhood wounds. The film spends the next hour and 50 minutes refuting that idea.
The majority of Deliver Me From Nowhere takes place in a gorgeous mid-century lakehouse in Colts Neck, New Jersey, apparently just down the shore from the house in which the real Springsteen wrote and recorded Nebraska. White disappears completely into the role without skirting parody, portraying the exhausted hitmaker as startled by his own numbness, blanked out and unsure of what to do next. He wanders around various small towns in New Jersey, plays Little Richard covers with a bar band at the famed Stone Pony, and lies on the floor of the lakehouse listening to Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop” at an ungodly volume (“It’s the most amazing record I’ve ever heard!”).
Flipping through channels, he catches Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in Terrence Malick’s 1973 film Badlands. The film, whose bleakness served as an inspiration for Nebraska, is based on the story of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, teenage lovers who committed a series of murders in 1958. The scene that’s in Deliver Me From Nowhere shows Sheen’s character—a greaser who looks not unlike Bruce Springsteen—murdering Spacek’s character’s father. In one of the film’s least subtle moments, a dazed Bruce is startled to attention. Bingo: inspiration!
After giving us the image of Bruce excitedly flipping through microfiche articles about Starkweather at the library, the film settles in as White patiently begins to put the song “Nebraska” together. Much is made throughout the movie about the pitch-black nature of the songs Springsteen was recording; at one point, Landau—who went from writing about Springsteen to managing him—tells his wife that the songs sound like they’ve been made by a guilty man. The scene from Badlands hangs over the songwriting like a dark cloud; Spacek’s bedroom in the scene looks quite a bit like the bedroom in which the young Springsteen hides from his own angry father.
His father, Dutch Springsteen, isn’t portrayed as the lightly comical foil of the dad in the “Growin’ Up” tape. In flashback scenes shot in black and white, Stephen Graham does a lot of sitting at the kitchen table smoking, a lot of sitting on a barstool smoking, and a lot of yelling at his family. At one point, he drunkenly forces Bruce into sparring practice in the middle of the night.
But the relationship between Bruce and his father is the film’s true dramatic crux, far more so than his romance with the invented Faye Romano, who exists primarily as a mirror for Springsteen’s many issues. Rather than reduce the father-son relationship to fodder for Nebraska’s songs or overall mood, Cooper positions it as the primary issue of Springsteen’s life at the time and the source of a depression that grows more and more crippling as the film unfolds. White is at his best when he gives himself over to psychic pain.
While some of Nebraska is drawn from Springsteen’s personal life, most of the album is populated by nervous criminals, broken-down factory workers, fatalists, and racket boys. “Mansion on the Hill” carries a whiff of the Hank Williams classic of the same name, but where the country standard uses the titular image as a symbol of a woman who was “alone with her pride” after rejecting the singer, Springsteen eyes the mansion like it’s Jay Gatsby’s house across the water, a promise of abundance that’s held out but never delivered. Despite his claim that he had “no conscious political agenda or social theme” while making the record, it’s impossible not to also hear it as a critique of the “city on a hill,” the avatar of American exceptionalism first coined by John Winthrop in 1630 and repeated ad nauseam by Ronald Reagan.
There’s no need to take Springsteen at his word there, though Cooper seems to have done so anyway. The Nebraska sessions produced what would become Springsteen’s most overtly political protest and his biggest hit: “Born in the U.S.A.” The song was inspired by the sight of returning Vietnam veterans who had been coerced into fighting a meaningless war, only to return to a country that refused to take care of them. It’s an anthem of disgust; the second verse is weirdly disjointed, the second halves of couplets swallowed up in grief. In what is the most impressive vocal performance in a film full of them, White leads the recording of the song with the full E Street Band, his voice so scuffed with spite that he sounds virtually identical to the original. Cooper’s mix highlights the power and drive that can feel lost in the shine of the real album’s production, a reminder that despite its continued misinterpretation, despite the gated drums, “Born in the U.S.A.” is a great fucking rock song. As for its meaning? Nothing more than the title of a movie script White’s Springsteen says he hadn’t even bothered to read.
Deliver Me From Nowhere is admittedly not interested in the cultural impact of Springsteen’s music, which is part of what makes it a successful film. It’s far more invested in the local: how fathers and sons do and don’t relate to one another, how a person can alternate between trying to save themself and abandoning themself entirely, the insufficiency of great work to ultimately provide meaning. Rather than inflate Bruce Springsteen into an even larger-than-life figure than he already is, it does something different: It shrinks him down, making him the same size as a character in a Bruce Springsteen song, and just as alive.