Bruce Springsteen is sad.
My mistake; Bruce Springsteen was sad. More specifically, Bruce Springsteen was sad while recording his 1982 album. Nebraska. And if the heavy-handed final title is to be believed, he's still sad. But it's a different kind of sadness—sadness managed by therapists, tirelessly supportive friends, and the quiet acceptance of a kind of abusive father figure with mostly good intentions.
This is the trick Springsteen: Deliver Me Out of Nowherea microcosm of the artist’s career, successfully complemented by subsequent hits such as I'm on fire And Born in USA. Despite smaller attempts to outline a grand, arcing trajectory, it is a largely self-contained effort; carefully cataloging the writing and recording of this record and how it changed Springsteen's worldview.
If this almost flat character arc seems like a shallow hook on which to hang the entire film's hat, how dare you? In case you didn't know, it's the biopic business: a titanic book and film industry that operates around two fundamental axioms. First, if you've been around long enough, you're also interesting enough to deserve a title with your name on it.
And secondly, how honest this production turns out to be depends entirely on the subject.
WATCH | Trailer “Springsteen: Deliver Me Out of Nowhere”:
This is not to say that memoirs, autobiographies, or individual official biographies are inherently misleading. For those with a talent—and a pervasive, perhaps self-destructive penchant for introspection—the revelations can reveal quite a lot. Likewise, in Deliver me out of nowherewe do see the pathos generated by Springsteen's destructive relationship with intimacy.
As the Boss (here played by BearJeremy Allen White) reaches the heights of his early career with his stunning album River Having been in the world, we look at its journey both backwards and forwards.
Next-level promise awaits him: going from rookie on the cusp of superstardom to a true household name. And his cow-eyed, almost defiantly warm manager and co-producer Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) keep hitting us over the head with what this move will mean.
Over and over again, kindly and continuously, like a doll hammering a felt nail, Landau repeats how hard it all is for Bruce. His wife Barbara Landau; to the Dunno studio costumes; He whispers to Springsteen himself (and, accordingly, always to the public) about how difficult it is for his friend.
Despite his inviting, crooked smile and casually cool manner of sitting in a diner booth with his arm behind his back, Springsteen has serious things to deal with. There is a storm in his head, and success – and, as a result, moving from his hometown to a big, busy city – is not so simple.
As the film continues, we learn possible reasons for this. In sporadic, monotonous flashes of Springsteen's past, we see the moments that shaped him as a child played by Matthew Anthony Pellicano Jr.
There's an obvious defense that Springsteen has built for his mother, played here with touching sincerity by Gaby Hoffmann. Highlighting the delicate bond and fierce love between mother and son, we watch a black-and-white scene of them dancing to old records in their living room. And if I had a nickel for every time Hoffman did exactly that (like she did as the frantic mother in Come on, come on) I would have two nickels now. It's not much, but it's strange that it happened twice.
But most importantly, Springsteen's complicated relationship with his father (Stephen Graham) is straight out of the movie. Shine. It's not hard to connect the dots to see how a father spanking his son and then congratulating him for hitting him back with a baseball bat when he yells at his mother can make a row on a child's head.
But there is a fine line when it comes to the usefulness of subtlety: before that line comes mature restraint, and after that comes empty gesticulation. This film crosses all boundaries.
25:00Are biopics rewriting history?
Film and culture critics Bilge Ebiri, Rad Simonpillai and Niko Stratis join Elamin to discuss biopics and what it means when they are seen as more fact than fiction, and when families and estates are involved in their creation.
IN Deliver me out of nowherethere's so little urgency in the writing that it feels intentional: when it comes to exploring the inside of Springsteen's skull, we're alternatively given the narrative equivalent of a brick wall or a brick to the head.
At times, Springsteen speaks with a dull ease, which we can only assume is the emotional front of all the times Landau literally tells us this. At other times, his lyrics are Freudian analysis drawn by numbers.
Though given the quirks and intricacies of Springsteen's restless, artistically neurotic mind, they can be incredibly difficult to parse.
Consider one such confusing memory, when his emotionally distant father takes Springsteen to the mansion on the hill.
Hey, he says later. I should write a song called Mansion on the Hill.
It's revelations like these that Springsteen and writer/director Scott Cooper feel it's their responsibility to portray the greatest responsibility. Factual, if irrelevant, questions of order that the people in the room can offer in lieu of understanding.
A strangely persistent and repeated remark recorded by Springsteen on tape Nebraska didn't care. Chill…? Or that the album was inspired by the work of Terrence Malick. Badlands – itself inspired by the insane and ne'er-do-well murderer Charles Starkweather.
How and whether these things relate to Sprinsteen's reserved face is more or less a matter of shrug. Because without the courage to make your own statements, Deliver me out of nowhere he has the same disease as Dwayne Johnson Destruction machine.
The downside of authoritative biographies—the inexplicable golden hen of publishing—is that they continually deceive readers into believing they are getting more of the story, rather than a blinkered version of it. There simply aren't enough troubling but necessary character flaws for the subject to either dramatically triumph or destroy.
They may be missing here since this is a carefully curated image of the item on the subject: “If you want my seal of approval, this is how I want my fans to see me; let's leave the uncomfortable things behind this curtain, shall we?”
But this is most likely due to the simple fact that there are no biopics. Being a celebrity doesn't automatically make you a functional and interesting fulcrum for the story.
While “Bruce Trumps” will likely hit theaters in droves, the fact that Springsteen is a talented entertainer who suffers from depression and is an all-around good guy isn't enough to make a “Bruce Trumps” movie turn out in droves. Deliver me out of nowhere interesting film.
That is, at least if you want a movie and not an authorized biography.
