“Deliver me from nowhere” -This is what we call it-is half a desolate sketch of a biopik About a depressed 32-years-seold man who Channel Surfs Across a Much Better Movie On TV One Night In The Fall of 1981. The Man is Bruce Springsteen (A Possessed Jeremy Allen White), The Movie is Terrence Malick’s “Badland,” and its story of A Killing Spree Across The American Heartland Gives The Wayward Rock God a Newfound Sense of Direction That Just Might Save His Life.
Adapted from Warren Zane’s book of the same name, and directed by Scott Cooper (“Out of the Oven”) with all its usual self -awareness, the chilly but the tender “lives me from nowhere” with Bruce returning to release after a triumphant year on tour with E Street Band. He is on the mega -judgment which he would claim soon afterwards, but even closer to the brink of a nervous degradation.
The reality of his imminent success has made Bruce feel like a stranger in Only home he has ever knownWhile the open highway that extends west in the future-a axiomatical symbol of freedom in previous songs such as “Thunder Road” and “Born To Run”-has suddenly come to seem the safest path to self-speech. Haunted by unresolved childhood trauma and suffering from a depression that he knows how to sing about but lacks the words to diagnose, Bruce (vaguely) is tormented by the scam to feel more lost than ever while fulfilling his fate.
In the ballad by Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate (whose name changed for Malick’s purpose film), Bruce sees his own disconnection staring back at him so clearly that his TV apparatus might as well be a mirror. This recognition is that the Bruce engine must start a new blast of creative self -discovery. It forces him to write an album that confronts the empty promise of Deliverance forward, thus creating a vehicle that is powerful enough to leave its demons in the back.
In its core, “liver me from Nowhere” is a small and crispy movie about how difficult it is to move forward when something holds you back. It is a movie about a guy who is stuck on a rocket that is about to ignite, just to discover that an anchoring of the size of New Jersey has been wrapped around his ankles; A guy who will rip in half down in the middle if he can’t find a way to shake that weight before lighting. This description may mean a certain urgent, but Cooper’s silence script is largely satisfied with moving with the speed and ambivalence of self -discovery. “I know who you are,” says someone Bruce in the parking lot after his usual show at Stone Pony. “It makes one of us,” he replies.
Just like “A complete unknown” Told the story of Dylan who goes electric, the richer but less inviting “deliver me from nowhere” could be said to tell the story of Springsteen that goes. And yet – for all the boring Biopian tropes that Cooper finds a way to force into his otherwise withdrawn character study – the comparison would wrongly characterize a movie whose subject hardly goes anywhere at all.
To make an effort to bridge the invaluable gap between “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Gus van Sant’s “Last Days”, Cooper’s film is at its best during the often distances when it finds Bruce staring at the walls of his isolated rental home in Colts Neck. Reading Flannery O’Connor. Listen to suicide. Maybe even think about committing it. It is difficult to say how deep Bruce’s anxiety goes, for – to Cooper’s credit – this movie does not tell us on any explicit terms. On the contrary, it rightly trusts that White’s performance will convey Bruce’s inner anxiety without putting too nice points on it or making it more readable than it really was for any of the people who knew him (or for himself, for that matter).
The head snapped and the shoulders hugged like an invisible snake is wrapped around his windscreen, White is less interested in mimicry than evocation, and he manages to create such ineffective convincing Springsteen because he allows himself to act as a fraud. While the manager’s person has long relied on their ability to represent freedom and burden at once, “deliver me from nowhere” introduces us to Bruce for a moment before he has learned to unite the two, and so whites play him with the honesty of a man who always feels he has been caught.
He doesn’t look A ton like Springsteen (although popped collar and black leather jackets help sell the illusion), and his ability to sing just like him is hard underutilized in a movie that standard for the actual recordings whenever it can, but his performance is full of a truth so natural and unwanted that at the end of the movie you almost forget that he plays someone else. In White’s hands-and with a key assistant from the prominent credible Odessa Young, who plays a Debbie Harry-style composition of all girlfriends that Bruce could not give himself to at that time-the film’s search for a lack of focus more a function than an error.
If only the rest of Cooper’s Biopics were so confident in letting Bruce’s feelings speak for themselves; If it only shared Bruce’s conviction that he and guitar technology Mike Batlan (a warm and fuzzy Paul Walter Hauser) undertook a four-track TEAC 144 in a Coltshalshus should exist separately from the arenor’s large hymn that he laid down with E Street Band in Studio. The not so great irony of “Deliver Me From Nowhere” is that the movie Teeters closest “Walk Hard” -like Tripe when it focuses on the Herculean effort required to preserve the cruelty in these recordings they were transferred to bands, as well as the simultaneous effort to convince the diets.
The problem is nicely embodied by the major role as Bruce’s lifelong manager producer, played here by a knotted but Schmoozy Jeremy Strong in a performance that makes Jon Landau sound like Roy Cohn’s more benevolent younger brother. It is not so strong is wrong, it is that he is in another movie altogether – one who has nothing to do with the pain from Bruce’s songwriting and everything to do with crazy story about trying to sell it.
Cooper mercifully cut the moaning trailer bit where Landau tells another record of how Springsteen has to repair himself with “Nebraska” so that he can “repair the whole world” after that, but the scene after the stage remains where Landau is forced smoothly over the fact that his star client goes acoustic and sings. No singles!? No interviews!? No tour!?!?. First he has to convince David Krumholtz, then he must be chewed out on the phone by the real Jimmy Iovine, then he has to go home to his wife and children with a dazzled look in his face.
Nobody denies that Landau was crucial for releasing Springsteen’s most radical album, but “deliver me from nowhere” never motivates why he should be the only character that exists independence from Bruce’s point of view. Is it looking at one of the most legendary musicians in modern history, his deepest pain in masterpieces as “Atlantic City” is really so unmatched that Cooper needed to lose about 30% of this movie to a glorified Hypeman whose only task is to sell us on how historically it was?
Yes, yes and no. The second consideration of which “deliver me from nowhere” beats an unhelpful compromise between hard-scabble portraits and hacktastic biopics has to do with how it dramatizes the source of Bruce’s aforementioned pain: ultralad, black and white Flashbacks where a young Springsteen becomes an outlet for all it specifies and resumes.
Stephen Graham is a wonderful actor, and I do not doubt he is also an excellent parent, but you only Know It is bad news when he shows up like someone’s father in a Biopic. In fact, the only fact in his casting is so atmospheric that it denies the need for many of his actual scenes, of which the majority are reductive and unclear visions of domestic abuse. Only the last of them to take place in the film’s current, manage to reveal everything we could not retrieve from the pictures from an adult Bruce staring at the home where he grew up.
Instead of embracing the raw humanity in Bruce’s characterization and celebrating its refusal to follow a certain prefab-emotional arc, “delivers me from nowhere” convinced that it must be reconciled for its sparseness with an equally large amount of auto-set noise-that it must compensate for the fact that it ends with Bruce in therapy in therapy in the therapy in therapy Cooper’s movie wants to be “Nebraska” in Rock Biopics, but it lacks the finesse to maintain the essence of that sound when transmitting it to the body of a commercial biopic. In that sense, it is at least too perfectly formulate how difficult it can be to move forward when something holds you back.
Rating: B-
“Springsteen: deliver me from nowhere“Had premiere at 2025 Tellurid Film festival. Searchlight Pictures release it in theaters on Friday 24 October.
Want to keep you updated on IndieWire’s movie Reviews And critical thoughts? Subscribe here To our recently launched newsletter, in review by David Ehrlich, where our main film critic and Head Review’s editor rounds off the best new reviews and streaming choices along with some exclusive Musings – all only available for subscribers.
