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YOU know that we’re getting into Oscar-bait season when biopics begin hitting the big screen. Last year, or the beginning of this year depending on where you are, it was Dylan’s ‘A Complete Unknown’ aka ‘Dylan Goes Electric’.
As we approach the final months of 2025, ‘The Boss’ aka Bruce Springsteen gets the treatment with ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ or ‘Springsteen Goes Acoustic’.
It’s the early 1980s and Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) has just come off touring ‘The River’. Keen for solitude, Bruce heads to a remote New Jersey rental house to plot his next move. Inspired by Terrence Malick’s ‘Badlands’ movie, he begins writing an acoustic album that will eventually become ‘Nebraska’, while also battling depression and demons of an abusive childhood.
Beloved entertainer as the topic – check. Creating a masterpiece – check. Trying to get past an unhappy childhood – check.
On paper, ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ is the Oscar-y type film that really should work at least on some level; I just don’t think director Scott Cooper or writer Warren Zanes (adapting his own book) know how to go through different levels of storytelling.
It opens with Bruce banging out ‘Born To Run’ on a Cincinnati stage and White looks every inch the Boss; soaked in sweat, his gait, his jaw, the singing – it’s all there and, in the few scenes we see some actual singing, White is very good as is his overall performance.
As the film unfolds, Bruce watches ‘Badlands’ on repeat, enamoured with its ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ killers, while letting all his pain pour out on tape, interspersed with flashbacks of his traumatic childhood with his parents (Gaby Hoffman and Stephen Graham) the latter the reason for Bruce’s trauma.
The film takes on a ‘watch – record – repeat’ tone. Cooper also adds in an entirely fictional love interest only to further emphasise Bruce’s inability to connect with anyone or anything outside of music on a deeper level.
Therein lies the problem of ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’… it’s all done on a surface level. The few flashback scenes paint a home with a distant father who is sometimes abusive, sometimes melancholic, without showing much more than that.
Bruce’s potential love angle isn’t given much to work with either but the film does succeed in giving flashes of how depression can affect someone, only to take it away with an ill-informed time jump that fails to allow the audience the chance to get into the nitty-gritty.
The New Jersey setting is beautifully captured as are the now-famous venues such as Asbury Park, Colts Neck and the Stony Pony with props to the cinematography. We are treated to get some cracking music, though, including an excellent recording of ‘Born in the USA’ to liven things up somewhat before delivering a downbeat ending.
In terms of performances White comes off best, conveying Springsteen’s thoughtfulness, talent and the intensity. It’s interesting to see the normally-bullish Jeremy Strong as Bruce’s manager Jon Landau in a non-confrontational role but he has little to work with and Graham shows flashes of his talent, with the likes of Paul Walter Hauser, David Krumholtz and Marc Maron providing supporting roles.
A slow, thoughtful film about the making of an 80s masterpiece, it’s a shame that the film didn’t live up to the album whose birth it documents.
