‘Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere’ Review: A By-the-Numbers Biopic of the Boss

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.

So we get comically tinged scenes of the type featuring Paul Walter Hauser as Springsteen crew member Mike Batlan, who buys the TASCAM 4-track tape deck on which the singer-songwriter records “Nebraska” and who’s always ready with a quip or a bug-eyed reaction shot that impishly implies the Boss’s brilliance. As Landau, Strong is on the opposite end of the spectrum: When Springsteen and the E-Street band record “Born in the U.S.A.,” which also resulted from the blue-collar bard’s “Nebraska” sessions, Strong’s reactions are so solemnly awestruck that the good Lord himself would roll his eyes. (Credit, though, is due to White, who does his own on-screen singing, for uncannily capturing Springsteen’s gravelly vocalizations.)

Biopics tend to flatten the creative impulse and any genius that results into something easily digestible. (“Mansion on the Hill” illustrated with shots of a young Springsteen running in front of a mansion on a hill? You betcha!) And everyone in Springsteen’s orbit is astonished by his artistry and all-too-ready to indulge his whims, which is hardly a good condition for compelling storytelling. The few characters drawn with some complexity are ill-treated, such as Faye (Odessa Young), the composite love interest who acts here as Springsteen’s muse and sacrificial lamb, gifting him a glimpse of a more stable life (in addition to the omnipresent St. Christopher medal he wears around his neck) while also unfairly bearing the brunt of his beta-male torment.

Despite this vaguely James Deanian woefulness—which White ostentatiously embodies within a revolving series of sequestered forest homes, run-down diners, and Asbury Park landmarks—the drama in Deliver Me from Nowhere barely rises above a simmer. It’s strangely apropos of the Boss’s real-life persona. There’s no doubt this once-in-a-lifetime talent has suffered, though in public his all-embracing geniality trumps any personal pain. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool man’s man who you feel has your back and who you always want to see succeed. (Not to mention, per the big step Springsteen finally takes at movie’s end, go to therapy.) But all that is hardly enough to justify Cooper’s flimsy two-hour paean to his personal growth.