If you like your rock superstars benignly anguished, Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere has you covered. As Bruce Springsteen, Jeremy Allen White is all slouched posture and distant stares, an achingly sensitive soul at an epochal crossroads. He’s coming off a very successful tour for his fifth studio album, 1980’s The River, and Columbia record exec Al Teller (David Krumholtz), to whom Bruce’s good friend and manager, Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), acts as buffer and go-between, wants a fast, money-minting follow-up.
But New Jersey’s favorite son, being a leather-jacketed artiste, takes his own sweet time when it comes to making music. And so it is that a reading of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, alongside a chance late-night television viewing of Terrence Malick’s Badlands, plants the seed for his acoustic album Nebraska. But as he’s putting pen to paper, Springsteen’s unresolved childhood issues with his drunken dad, Dutch (Stephen Graham), are dredged up.
You might say that Bruce has to walk hard through all these repressed memories, though it’s more like a slow shuffle toward several painfully trite revelations. There are plenty of real-life anecdotes that Cooper, who also penned the film’s screenplay, draws from Warren Zane’s 2023 behind-the-scenes book Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, but they’re filtered through the hoariest of biopic clichés.