Directed By Scott Cooper

Starring – Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser

The Plot – Bruce Springsteen’s (White) journey crafting his 1982 album Nebraska, which emerged as he recorded Born in the USA with the E Street Band. Based on Warren Zanes’ book.

Rated PG-13 for thematic material, some sexuality, strong adult language, and smoking.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere | Official Trailer

POSITIVES

Rather than constructing another by the numbers biopic chronicling the rise, fall, and redemption of one of America’s greatest songwriters, Cooper instead zeroes in on the creative process assembled in writing one of Springsteen’s biggest albums, and while it doesn’t always make for the most entertaining of exploits, there’s something boldly ambitious about Cooper choosing to capture the quietly sedated moments to Bruce’s life, as he navigates traumatic depression as a means to motivation. Unlike previous biopics that treat musicianship as a spontaneous form of convenience, this film treats the past as the key towards unlocking the future, with Bruce’s tribulations throughout an abusive father manifesting the flawed protagonist that we see before us, but one that never loses sight of Bruce’s selflessness as an entertaining superstar that he was forced to juggle with so much conflicting vulnerability persisting within his psyche. As a screenwriter, Cooper doesn’t effectively land impact on a lot of the arcs that he vividly attempts, but one dynamic involving Bruce and his manager Jon (Played by Strong), is without question the script’s single most compelling aspect, with the latter serving as a healing crutch to the former, in ways that legitimately appraise the empathy and connective bond between them, without anything that feels heavily influenced by telegraphed intentions. Part of the appeal here is certainly in the depths of each actor commanding such a sturdy screen presence to their respective portrayals, with a lived-in brand of chemistry effortlessly articulated between them that makes them feel like soulmates, but even beyond that, their interactions are the moments when the movie’s inconsistent dialogue settles in to find comfortable consistency in the honesty and immensity of value of their developed relationship, beginning initially as what feels like business, before transcending into something disarmingly personal between the two, with Jon enacting a concerning empathy for his associate and friend, which allows the movie a hearty backbone that compliments the consistency of the movie’s dramatic enveloping. When you bring two legitimate powerhouse actors like White and Strong to the spectrum, you receive meticulous nuance in the way they each approach these characters, and with Jeremy taking his biggest step forward with a performance that masterfully renders both sides of Bruce, between the superstar and the subdued, it makes it all the easier to buy him as the celebrated musician, even despite looking nothing like Bruce at any point in the singer’s life. While there were initial concerns that his turn here would simply be an extension of his portrayal as Carnie, on TV’s “The Bear”, there’s a far more secluded isolation factor to Bruce that mentally makes him feel a million miles away, while physically residing in the moment, and it only further conveys what we already knew about White being one of the most tenderly gifted emotional performers of his generation, especially once the guarded walls of Bruce’s past come tumbling down, leading to a highly impactful moment representing the soul-shifting epiphany needed for Bruce to find closure within himself. White also does a lot of the singing and harmonica playing that you hear throughout the music performances, and while it’s incredibly difficult to channel the gruff roaring of Bruce’s vocal range, Jeremy remarkably comes as close as humanly possible, attempting some of Bruce’s most iconic tracks with a fearlessness that should be commended. As for Strong, he follows up a memorable turn as Trump’s lawyer, Roy Cohn, in 2023’s “The Apprentice”, with another mesmerizing turn as a real life figure, this time with the same stern commitment to earnest deliveries, that is enhanced even further this time with a morality conveying the nurturing hand that he is to Bruce, supplanting a warm blanket of a feeling to the movie’s precedent, which I truly couldn’t get enough of throughout the engagement. Last but not least, I want to express some praise to the production, particularly in wardrobe, make-up, and prosthetics, which helped to transcribe believability to the transformation of some of its most defining characters. For Bruce, this means seamlessly emulating his most iconic looks, right down to the tee that is the familiarity in texture of his sweat-laced hair during stage performances, but for his father (Played by Stephen Graham), it represents a naturalistic element to aging that rights the wrongs of many biopics before it, piercing the hearts of the audience at the moment its impact can be felt the loudest.

NEGATIVES

While Cooper takes some refreshing deviations to music biopics in ways that makes this feel like a quiet meditation on the demands of fame, it doesn’t exactly make it an entertaining film, especially with a finished cut in the editing chair that makes the movie feel like a two hour music montage, with very little fleshed out depth to the majority of the established arcs. Part of the problem is certainly in the script’s constant deviation between arcs, which feels as predictably telegraphed as quickly as the movie’s opening act, but there’s also a growing frustration to the integrity and beneficial pay-offs to these scenes, as a result of prematurely abrupt cuts that intrude upon interpretation, and while it’s already difficult to invest in a love story that is already established to fail, or flashbacks to Bruce’s abusive past, featuring the student film level of artistic expression of a black and white canvas, it’s even more difficult to remain patient with stacked scenes of unfulfillment creating an obscuring divide to the audience, resulting in brutalized pacing consistencies that makes the film feel twice as long as its runtime, even at the two hour mark that it clocks in at. One such example can be paid to Bruce going to therapy to alleviate a mental heft that has lingered with him throughout the film, yet one that hilariously is apparently cured in the following scene, outlining the rushed sloppiness that plagues the engagement, even with a pace that is a relentless bore. Beyond an arduous finished cut, tonally the movie doesn’t provide a compelling open door to inexperienced fans seeking an opportunity to experience what is so endearing about Bruce’s magnitude as a performer, feeling like a continuous wet blanket of an engagement that drowns on repetitiously, without anything in the way of imaginative technique to the design of its music performances, to combat such a depressing feeling. Not for lack of trying, as Cooper ratchets the volume of these performances to eleven, in order to at least fool audiences into thinking the music serves as a triumph above everything that Bruce is feeling psychologically, but Cooper’s direction immerses too much of the audience into the downtrodden of what his superstar is feeling, and as a result the film feels a bit one-note in its emotionality, even during scenes that should feel like an optimistic opportunity to Bruce, yet still can’t effectively evade this pit in the stomach of audiences that compromise its element of escapism. There’s also some wasted castings in the depths of a highly gifted ensemble, particularly Paul Walter Hauser and Odessa Young, who after a spark of influence during their initial introductions, fade into the background of a movie that regretfully moves on without them. This is especially tragic for Young, who serves as the love interest of the story for Bruce, but one who after beginning hot and heavy during its opening act, is distanced concerningly the longer the film persists, and while it’s nice to see two charismatic powerhouses added to the fold, the lack of established value that each of them supplants to the film makes me wish that their characters were all together omitted from its finished product, especially considering they’ve both done much superior projects to this. Finally, as a light-Springsteen fan, I found a bit of disappointment with the assembled soundtrack for the movie, especially considering we never hear the finished version of “Nebraska”, the song that the movie centers around, in its imperfect glory. As previously conveyed, I give my complete respect to Jeremy Allen White for even attempting to conjure a unique vocal range like Bruce’s, but far too often the movie incorporates actual Bruce vocals to blend Jeremy’s vocals synthetically, and considering a majority of the music performances are of Bruce performing someone else’s music, I didn’t feel like there was enough opportunity to indulge in Bruce’s lyrical connective tissue to society, with the songs it does feature relying on some of the most obvious and boring singles that even a borderline Springsteen fan would expect in a movie chronicling his music impact.

OVERALL
“Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” does offer some refreshing deviations from the cliche’d expectations of interchangeable music biopics of the past decade, but it’s nevertheless a drearily drab and even tediously unengaging portrait of the creative process that has no chance of appealing to anyone other than Springsteen enthusiasts seeking another reason to celebrate their flawed superstar. While Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong stitch together ample heart to the design of their nourishing dynamic, and the make-up and costume designs does a remarkable job at transforming the former into the boss before us, the subduedly meditative approach of Scott Cooper sedates audiences without the inspiration to feel triumph, cementing a sluggishly clunky engagement that delivers only boredom.

My Grade: 5.9 or D+