Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere ★★★
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- 12 minutes ago
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Availability: Showing widely in theaters (opened October 24). Streaming expected on Disney+ or Hulu in early 2026. See JustWatch here for future purchase and online viewing availability.
A Portrait of the Artist
Bruce Springsteen is 32. A lonely, depressed soul for the few months that are the focus of director and writer Scott Cooper’s biopic of the rock superstar. Cooper, whose script is based on Warren Zanes’ book of the same name with the subtitle “The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska,” homes in on the brief period in 1982 when Springsteen wrote songs reflecting a childhood and early adulthood darkened by a difficult father and his own battles with depression.
White doesn’t inhabit the role as fully as Timothy Chalamet did Dylan.
Jeremy Allen White is credible as an emotionally screwed up young man. While dramatic and interior, as well as expert at singing and playing guitar and harmonica, White doesn’t inhabit the role as fully as Timothy Chalamet did Dylan in last year’s “A Complete Unknown” (an interesting comparison of titles that feature nothingness). It’s difficult not to see Carmy from TV’s “The Bear” rather than Springsteen.
Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) isn't comfortable on the city streets.
Cooper attempts to explain this period of Springsteen’s life with black-and-white flashbacks to his abusive father (Stephen Graham) and somewhat passive mother (Gaby Hoffmann) and his ongoing relationship with an attractive young waitress and mother.
Springsteen finds something curiously relevant in the experience of 19-year-old Charles Starkweather, who in 3 months in 1958 murdered 11 people in Nebraska and Wyoming.
Exhausted from touring and increasingly disturbed, Springsteen finds something curiously relevant in the experience of 19-year-old Charles Starkweather, who in 3 months in 1958 murdered 11 people in Nebraska and Wyoming. He also becomes fascinated with Southern Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor. In this telling, Springsteen gleans from his research and reading the notion of “a meanness in the world” (Starkweather) and that one comes from nowhere: “Where you come from is gone...” (O’Connor), the latter a rejoinder to those who believe that Springsteen’s Asbury Park and Freehold, New Jersey, origins grounded him firmly in “somewhere.”
Springsteen (White), right, seems friendless at this point in his life, with no personal relationships to his bandmates. Only his girlfriend Faye and his unrelentingly dedicated agent Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) seem to have an ability to draw him out.
In writing and performing the album originally titled “Starkweather,” featuring “him” (the murderer) then changed to “Nebraska” with the use of “me,” Springsteen is shown exorcising (or simply recognizing) his demons through writing and performing—alone. So personal is Springsteen’s relationship to this music that he rejects the studio and other musicians and insists that the album be cut from his bedroom tapes. The album—slow, dark, and droogy—as therapy.
Springsteen (White) retreats to a bedroom in a rental rural house in New Jersey,
writing and recording songs that reflect dark periods of his childhood.
The film could be viewed as presenting a standard biopic arc: success, problems with success (and other stuff), depression/trauma, and a return to success, the last recognized in a studio “applause” scene when the iconic “Born In the USA” is recorded to everyone’s satisfaction and another when the techies figure out how to give “Nebraska” that authentic bedroom sound. (“Born” won’t appear on “Nebraska” but will be put on ice until Springsteen returns to standard recordings.)
The tight focus of “Deliver Me” makes for a film that’s repetitive, that reloads scenes and themes.
A worthy effort to get at the psychological strata of a distinctive album and moment, the tight focus of “Deliver Me” makes for a film that’s repetitive, that reloads scenes and themes: the black-and-white frontal shots of Springsteen’s boyhood home, as if the house were the site of The Amityville Horror; little Bruce at the top of the stairs, anxiously awaiting the arrival of abusive Dad; time and again, Bruce spending happy times with his girlfriend Faye (Odessa Young) and her daughter Haley (portrayed by twins Vienna and Vivienne Barrus) at the carny booths on the boardwalk or, more than once, at the carousel; his repeated failure to commit to Faye, who says, “Haley and I aren’t playing house. We’re real.” Bruce’s father may have been abusive, but the cinematic treatment here is redolent of the cinema of the 1940s and 1950s that culminated with “Psycho” (1960), when Freud was de rigueur and films scoured the past for what went wrong in childhood—typically, a bad parent.
For all the anguish and angst, “Nebraska” seems not to deliver Springsteen from nowhere—or anywhere.
Half the film is about Springsteen making a very personal album, confronting his past to do so, confronting his ghosts. The other half claims he’s escaping reality—he won’t commit to Faye; he has no relationship with his bandmates; he flees to Los Angeles, where he knows no one. His one “friend” is his agent, Jon Landau, well-played by Jeremy Strong, but again it’s hard to get Kendall Roy of TV’s “Succession” out of one’s head. For all the anguish and angst, “Nebraska” seems not to deliver Springsteen from nowhere—or anywhere. He’s still depressed. The only ray of hope—a tacked-on happy ending—is that he’s found what every artist in LA has: a therapist.
Springsteen (White) spends happy times with his girlfriend Faye (Odessa Young) on the New Jersey seashore, but he can't commit to her and her daughter.
The technical aspects of producing a saleable version of “Nebraska” are at once interesting and a bit too in the weeds. The album is recorded using 4-track cassette equipment in the Boss’s bedroom in a rental house in rural New Jersey. His only assistant is a “friend” (Paul Walter Hauser) who is there to run the equipment and keep his mouth shut. The machinations Landau and others go through to copy the tapes without distortion may be of interest to recording gurus. Beyond that, the venture is a lengthy metaphor for Springsteen’s desire for authenticity. An authenticity that leads him to insist that the album be released without publicity, without touring, and without his image on the cover.
It takes a village of technicians to produce the simple sound of recordings in the bedroom. The lengthy technical scenes are a metaphor for Springsteen's desire for authenticity.
Probing the psychology of this mid-career musician proves to be a quicksand of ideas and possibilities. Springsteen’s fusion of himself and Starkweather seems particularly bizarre, as if by contemplating “meanness” he can understand and forgive his father and perhaps himself. It’s impossible to know what’s going on in the artist’s head—though that’s what the film is all about.
She says: Biggest debate: Is “Nebraska” a folk album?
He says: To be really authentic it helps to be really depressed.
Date: 2025
Director: Scott Cooper
Starring: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Stephen Graham, Gaby Hoffmann, Odessa Young, Vienna and Vivienne Barrus, Paul Walter Hauser
Runtime: 120 minutes
Country: United States
Language: English
Other Awards: 1 to date
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