Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere

Ghosts on a Four-Track

It's strange to watch a movie about the most famous man in New Jersey that consists mostly of him sitting alone in a bedroom. By 1981, Bruce Springsteen was supposed to be a stadium-shaking deity. He’d just finished touring *The River*, a massive double-album victory lap that cemented his status as the voice of the American working class. But the man we meet at the beginning of Scott Cooper’s *Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere* isn't a god. He's just a guy hiding out in a rented house in Colts Neck, trying to figure out why success feels so much like suffocation.



I've always been skeptical of the music biopic machine. They usually flatten a life into a Wikipedia page set to a greatest hits soundtrack. Cooper mostly avoids that trap by narrowing his focus to the creation of *Nebraska*, the stark 1982 solo album Springsteen recorded on a four-track cassette deck. It's an album populated by drifters, killers, and people out of options—themes that mirrored the severe depression Springsteen himself was battling. The director understands the tactile nature of this era. You hear the hiss of the tape, the clatter of the TEAC 144 machine, the squeak of guitar strings. It feels like you’re trapped in that drafty house with him.

But Cooper doesn't always trust his own minimalist instincts. Every so often, the movie cuts away to arty, black-and-white flashbacks of Bruce’s childhood, telegraphing his trauma with a heavy hand. We get the standard-issue scenes of his volatile father, played with bristling anger by Stephen Graham. I'm not sure these sequences were necessary. The music already tells us what the boy went through. The camera doesn't need to spell it out.



When the movie stays in the present, it finds its rhythm. There's a quiet, extended sequence where Bruce first lays down the title track. Jeremy Allen White sits on the edge of an unmade bed, the microphone too close to his mouth. Watch the way his shoulders slump. His chest barely moves when he breathes. White has spent the last few years weaponizing his frantic, high-wire anxiety on *The Bear*, but here, he forces all that nervous energy inward. He doesn't go for a flashy impersonation. Instead, as *TIME*’s critic noted, "White simply plays Bruce as a man adrift, a rock’n’roll astronaut cut loose from his space module."

His primary tether to Earth is his manager, Jon Landau, played by Jeremy Strong. Strong is fascinating here. He sits in the corner of recording studios like a watchful owl, absorbing his client's erratic moods with an almost pathological patience. You can see the exact moment Landau realizes the polished, commercial album CBS Records wants isn't coming. Strong’s jaw tightens. He adjusts his glasses. He decides, without a word, to go to war for these muddy bedroom demos.



Whether that narrow, brooding focus works for you probably depends on your patience for watching a man actively avoid his own life. The movie drags in its back half. People keep telling Bruce he needs to face his demons, which feels completely redundant when we're watching him literally record an entire album about them. Sometimes the script acts like it doesn't trust the audience to understand subtext. (A problem that plagues too many modern adult dramas, honestly.)

Yet, when the lights came up, the feeling that lingered wasn't frustration. It was the memory of White in that dark room, hitting the red record button, trying to sing himself out of a corner. Cooper’s film isn't a flawless biography. It's messy, a little repetitive, and occasionally tries too hard to explain a mystery that doesn't want solving. But maybe that's the point. *Nebraska* was an imperfect, ragged piece of art, and it survived exactly because of its rough edges. The movie, for all its stumbles, honors that same fragile humanity.