Flasz On Film

Synopsis: In the aftermath of superstardom, Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) retreats to a quiet New Jersey farmhouse to wrestle with fame, family trauma, and his creative identity. There, he records Nebraska, a hauntingly raw album born from solitude, self-doubt, and the ghosts of his past. 

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere extends the now well-established trend of musical biopics about iconic artists of our time, which began with the critically acclaimed yet formulaic prestige items like Ray and Walk the Line and was turbocharged by the success of Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman. However, in contrast to many other such movies that attempt to be formally subversive, while they frequently still follow the playbook of a cradle-to-grave narrative drowning in awards-friendly schmaltz, this Scott Cooper-directed movie finds itself at a nexus of converging ambitions.  

On one hand, it is still very much a piece of formulaic storytelling whose aim it is to use a transformative central performance as a pillar upon which a narrative would be draped that leaves the viewer with new or consolidated knowledge about the artist whose name is in the title. On another, the movie fits within the spectrum of Cooper’s directorial interests spanning intergenerational trauma and male mental health, topics he has explored before in such films as Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace or even Antlers.  

To this end, Cooper chose to defy the standard chord progression you’d come to expect from a movie like this. In contrast to Rocketman and Baz Luhrman’s Elvis, the film keeps the storytelling grounded in grainy reality, but instead of driving us through a number of expected beats, like seeing The Boss pick up his first telecaster or walking by his side during his early years of artistic starvation, the movie commits to giving us a snapshot of Springsteen’s life from a moment in time that ended up crucial for him… and intriguing enough for the filmmaker to draw his focus.  

We find him at a fork in the road, as he grapples with his past and turns his inner turmoil into artistic expression. He builds a repertoire of songs in his bedroom that deal with his grief, regret and anger at his father’s roughness mixed in with abject neglect. Instead of a familiar string of dramatic beats we get nearly exclusively an exercise in introspection where Jeremy Allen White’s performance as Springsteen and Jeremy Strong’s turn as Jon Landau, Springsteen’s producer and manager, carry the heft of the entire story. Thus, you will be hard pressed to find too many moments festooned with swelling violins and engineered to extract water from the audience’s tear ducts, let alone instances of shameless fan service.

For example, after we see the seeds of his iconic song “Born in the USA” sown in the movie in the form of a Paul Schrader script landing in Bruce’s lap and then an acoustic guitar getting us into the general vicinity of what the song was going to be like, we’re not really indulged by the filmmaker in the way Bohemian Rhapsody and many other recent musical biopics did. We skip to the finished recording and a brief acknowledgement from everyone in the studio that they had a generation-defining hit on their hands. And then we see how Springsteen shelves it because he feels the need to express the demons eating his alive as a matter of urgency instead.

Granted, Cooper occasionally defaults to convention and allows his movie to expose its tender underbelly using familiar imagery, but it surely earns those violins it eventually employs to embellish its emotional climax. Thus, it is a movie that trusts its viewer to look past Springsteen trivia and see them merely as color and tonal ambiance in service of a more general story about a man trapped between a home he escaped and the frightening limbo of being out there on choppy waters without a safe port to return to. In fact, it could just as well have been a movie about a fictitious musician, like Crazy Heart, that packages these general concepts relating to male mental health, the paradoxical need to confront one’s father while also seeking his approval and the implicit societal expectation for men to keep their shit together without letting anyone know about the extent of the storm raging within them into a completely manufactured narrative.   

But it is still a movie about Springsteen, the clue is in the title, so the film straddles the line between factual veracity and emotional realism of Springsteen’s thematic journey from complete denial of success to its eventual acceptance by way of finally confronting his childhood demons. Naturally, you can fault it for indulging occasionally and maybe manipulating the viewer with its monochromatic flashbacks or montages of definitive indie provenance, but it happens to capture something that many such biopics either fail to acknowledge or gloss over while on their merry way through the character’s extended biographies.  

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere captures the innate relatability of its protagonist and elevates him beyond the visage of a tortured artist dealing with fame and notoriety. While acknowledging factual observations of The Boss still coming back to jam with his buddies even as a rockstar selling out arenas, Cooper’s camera captures him as just a man. A man who grew up with a father who had his own demons to slay and who had to face adulthood without the emotional equipment his upbringing was supposed to supply. Springsteen’s relatability, conveyed effortlessly by Jeremy Allen White who may be on course for an Oscar nod for this one, is not confined to his working-class image, but the turmoil and struggle many men will recognize as their own. And this gives the movie the right to telegraph a thing or two or linger on a close-up for a few seconds because its storytelling horsepower was deployed elsewhere, in pursuit of a more general catharsis.