Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
Credit: 20th Century Studios
Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is your standard, by-the-numbers music biopic. Almost everything you expect to happen, happens: daddy issues, writer’s block, neglected love interest, execs meddling with personal music…
And yet, despite this, Springsteen—aka A Tale of Two Jeremies—offers convincing performances by both Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong. Strong, as Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau, wears a predictable New Jersey accent and try-hard business persona, but his unexpected sweetness—and ultimately, loyalty—is a nice subversion of the evil manager trope so common in this genre. Also predictably, White’s vocal fry and haunted gaze sell Springsteen’s brokenness, and Stephen Graham (Adolescence) has a potent turn as Springsteen’s mercurial father.
But predictability and clichés can’t be elevated by acting alone.
Here, most glaringly, the songwriter’s interiority often feels out of reach. When a final title card reveals “Bruce continued to battle depression,” realization finally dawns: so that’s what he was going through. Instead of truly letting us in, instead of involving us and our own emotions, the script spells out Springsteen’s feelings with clunky, expositional dialogue: at one point, Landau tells his wife how conflicted Bruce is, how “his music shows he’s condemned.”
To the film’s credit, a restrained focus on the making of Springsteen’s “Nebraska” album punches up formulaic emotions. It would have been easy for the filmmakers to throw in more concerts and fanservice than they did. Still, it’s not enough: the conflict in Springsteen feels brushed over, commercial in its assumption that viewers already know Bruce’s story—or at least that they already know the plot of every music biopic. (Dewey Cox did it best).
Reviewed at NYFF 2025.
119 min.
Where to Watch: Now in theaters.