“Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” Tamps the Boss Down

The breaking point comes during a cross-country road trip during which Bruce's driver, Matt (Harrison Sloane Gilbertson), must help a frustrated Bruce stay on his feet at the county fair. But this scene is lively, typical and superficial; it doesn't so much depict a breakdown as signify it. Flashbacks to Bruce's childhood reveal that his volatile father also suffered from the disease, and the scenes are inevitably, if unsurprisingly, moving, even if Cooper resorts to clichés by depicting them in black and white, generalizing them as if childhood in the fifties was like the televisions of the time. The most enjoyable part is not the content of the memories, but their staging: Bruce constantly drives up to the house where he grew up, which now looks abandoned, and looks at it, as if triggering memories. In Warren Zanes' 2023 book: “Deliver me out of nowhere” on which the film is based, Springsteen is quoted as having participated in these trips and, he continued, “listening to the voices of my father, my mother and me as children.” This is a much more memorable and exciting description than any of the images in the film.

As for the meat of the story, the making and release of Nebraska, Springsteen is at once exciting in its contours but also rushed and fuzzy in its details. Scene after scene exists not to closely observe the action or reveal aspects of character, but to convey bits of information that add up to the plot: John meets an executive who expects Bruce's next album to be a big hit; Bruce lazily plucks his guitar and taps the cover of a book of O'Connor's stories. Cooper pays far more attention to the delivery of a multi-track tape deck to a partner named Mikey (Paul Walter Hauser) than to Bruce's attempts to record his songs with it. Bruce sings very little at home—enough only for evidentiary purposes, and not filmed with any sense of admiration or surprise. There is no idea what Bruce is actually looking for during a performance, how he worked on each song, how he added additional instruments (all performed by himself) in his home studio. He asks Mikey to help him record, but their work together is not taken into account in this crucial process.

The omissions, the lack of curiosity in the telling of history, have more than just factual significance; they narrow the emotional spectrum of the film, including its performances. White's performance is purposeful and fluent; as a copycat, it's not startling or distractingly creepy, but rather thoughtful and serious. Compared to Timothée Chalamet's channeling of Bob Dylan in “Complete unknownBut White as Bruce is also far less expressive than Chalamet as Bob, not because he's a naturally less expressive actor, but because Cooper's script and direction don't give him enough scenes in which to develop character.

Bruce not only demands the release of unsweetened tape recordings, but also offers strict conditions for the album's release (no singles, no tour, no press), and John's job is to convey this message to record company executives. The bond of devotion and understanding between the two men forms the emotional center of the film, but their connection is largely unexplored. John encourages Bruce to just go ahead and make music. “Find something real,” John says, “he can cut through the noise.” John is a former music journalist and critic, and in a scene at home with his wife (Grace Gummer), he offers a few film lines about “Nebraska” from an outside perspective. Bruce “is conveying something deeply personal and dark,” John says, later adding that Bruce feels guilty about becoming a star and leaving the people of his hometown behind. The film never goes further in examining the content of the album in question; these short lines of dialogue sum up Cooper's view of what the album has to say.

What Cooper avoids is that Nebraska is, among other things, a political album. His songs are filled with tales of blue-collar workers being dealt a bad deal: losing their jobs, losing their house to the bank, owing money, taking a job for a gangster, being disfavored by a boss, going broke and turning to crime, trying to live with the trauma of military service in the Vietnam War. The album not only tells the story of losing faith in the American dream; it provides a retrospective debunking of the idea that there was more to this so-called dream. In “Springsteen,” Bruce says he likes how the demo sounds “from the past or something.” Far from looking back with nostalgia to the fifties, however, “Nebraska” suggests that the lives of working Americans have always had violence and trauma lurking beneath the quietly suppressed surface, and that the pressures and burdens he and the country are currently experiencing come from the past. Cooper's film certainly doesn't make Bruce's childhood a happy one, but by limiting Bruce's retrospective gloom to the personal sphere, it ignores the singer-songwriter's larger social vision. The film lacks the courage of Springsteen's real beliefs. ♦