Do all rock and roll biopics have to have a romantic relationship at the center of it? I’m not talking about those films that cover the musician’s entire career and therefore must give us a melodramatic take on one of the subject’s many marriages. I’m talking about the biopics that invent a woman or compile a few together because that is what the genre calls for. Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is unfortunately so burdened by this convention that the genius of Bruce Springsteen and his music gets lost in the noise.
Written and directed by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, The Pale Blue Eye) and starring Jeremy Allen White (The Bear, The Iron Claw), the biopic picks up at the end of Springsteen’s River Tour in 1981. He is tired and on the precipice of stardom. His record company (represented in the form of character actor David Krumholtz) is already eagerly looking toward his next album to capitalize on the 31-year-old’s success. He is sent back to his home state of New Jersey by his manager, Jon Landau (a quietly endearing Jeremy Strong), to rest and write new songs.
When being home heightens Springsteen’s depression, he starts reminiscing about his troubled relationship with his father, Douglas (Stephen Graham), who was drunk and borderline abusive for most of his childhood. These feelings are only exacerbated by Terrence Malick’s film Badlands, which inspires Bruce to write a song from the perspective of a convicted murderer.
This results in the song “Nebraska,” which would soon be the title track of the album of the same name. Watching White “write” lyrics and argue with clueless engineer Mike Batlan (an underused Paul Walter Hauser) in his bedroom is surprisingly entertaining. It’s fascinating to watch a genius work, even if it’s fictional. Cooper gets this part right. The moments where Bruce is fighting for his vision in the studio with the likes of mixer Chuck Plotkin (Marc Maron) and Landau are some of Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere’s best. I would gladly watch a full film where each song on the Nebraska album gets a full explanation. Instead, some songs aren’t even sonically acknowledged other than a name on a freshly written track list.
Instead of solely focusing on the making of this album and the business and paternal relationships at the heart of it, Bruce enters a doomed but sweet relationship with Faye (Odessa Young), a waitress and single mom who is intrigued that Bruce got out of his hometown. The presence of this relationship feels like a distraction and a detractor rather than a way to propel the story forward. This is nothing against Young’s performance as Faye. She gives the single mom more depth and dimension than the script does. If anything, it makes it even more frustrating that Cooper is spending precious screentime on this fictional relationship that overshadows the connections that make this specific time in Springsteen’s career so fascinating.
White’s is at his best when he is sharing scenes with Jeremy Strong and Stephen Graham. Strong injects an elder brother/uncle/paternal sensibility into Landau, something that, if given the proper amount of screentime, is an interesting foil to Springsteen’s relationship with his own father. Graham, who is fresh off his Emmy win for Adolescence, provides more of a looming presence in the saddest corners of Springsteen’s memory rather than a current one. Again, like Hauser, Krumholtz, Maron, or even Mamie Gummer as Landau’s wife, he’s a character actor with not much to do.
What makes a Springsteen song so relatable is that he has a unique ability to cut directly to the core of someone’s humanity. There’s a simplicity to his lyrics that only adds complexity to a song’s meaning. All of that is vacant from Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. What remains is a mediocre biopic that we’ve seen time and time again.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere hits theaters Friday. Watch the trailer below.
