Anyone expecting a cover-to-cover story of Bruce Springsteen in “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” will be sorely disappointed. What you will find, though, is a desolate year in the life of the arena-rock superstar, when his sorrow and searching were concentrated enough to fill a lifetime.
It’s not often that a big-budget biopic devotes itself to meditations on anguish. But in 1981, that’s exactly where we find Bruce Springsteen—adrift, hurting and unsure of his place in the world. He’s breaking through the charts yet feels increasingly cut off from the working-class America that shaped him and his songwriting. Struggling with that widening chasm, he turns back to his muse, the weary American Dream: dead-end roads, runaway lovers and blue-collar Americans running out of time and luck. These themes not only shape his landmark acoustic album, Nebraska, but also form the emotional core of “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere.” Unique in its smallness and quietness, “Deliver Me from Nowhere” isn’t just a paean for Nebraska—it’s an evocative exploration of what it means to hurt so deeply it consumes your life.
Jeremy Allen White’s Bruce is lonesome and capricious, exhausted after finishing a thunderous tour for The River and not comfortable with the fame his first top 10 single, “Hungry Heart,” has brought him. Spiralling into depression and desperate to get away from the spotlight before he completely burns out, Bruce packs up and heads to Colts Neck, N.J., where he’s famous enough to be sick of hearing his voice on the radio, but not enough to feel out of place. When a local car salesman recognizes Bruce, telling him that he knows who he is, Bruce smiles glibly. “That makes one of us,” he says.
In his search to find himself, Bruce goes through the motions of mundane life: regularly playing local clubs, frequenting diners and watching TV. Inspiration fatefully strikes him out of the blue after he flicks on the TV and stumbles upon Terrence Malick’s 1973 crime drama “Badlands,” based on a real tale of young and aimless American killers. The next day, Bruce buys a multitrack cassette deck and starts laying down Nebraska.
The film powers through the recording of the individual tracks on Nebraska, which appear only for expository’s sake. This is a real shame, since it blows past a chance to peer further into the cracks in Bruce’s soul and to see the rawness he bled into the album, which White conveys with an earnest, unshowy confidence. In the second half, when the film occupies itself with the arduous process of producing the album, we’re offered a second and more substantial glimpse into what these songs mean to Bruce as his manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) and his team struggle to capture the electricity of Bruce’s home demo reel on a record. The strength of Bruce’s conviction and the ensuing tug-of-war between honesty and commercialism push the film toward something genuinely affecting.
Punctuating the 1981 narrative are black-and-white flashbacks of Bruce’s childhood with his vice-ridden, mercurial father, Douglas (Stephen Graham). Douglas is a difficult and domineering figure who tries to instill a sense of good ol’ American masculinity in Bruce, thereby becoming the source of his repressed trauma and hurt. The two are not so dissimilar—with age, Douglas becomes as lonely and lost as his son. Occasionally, these nostalgia-tinged flashbacks come across as unnecessarily artsy flourishes, but in the moments when the two simply share icy silence and when the past blends with the present, the vision sharpens.
The women in Bruce’s life are not afforded the same narrative grace, largely serving as saintly figures who do little other than further the plot. Single mother, waitress, and composite love interest Faye’s (Odessa Young) dates with Bruce are superficial, where they talk about nothing more than their shared music taste and play house together. Jon’s wife, with whom he shares his worries about Bruce, exists for no reason save to be an audience stand-in about as compelling as a piece of tissue paper. At least Bruce’s mother (Gaby Hoffmann) is granted the ability to feel both feverish anger at her husband and real love and concern for him when the chips are down.
The quiet strength that “Deliver Me from Nowhere” possesses shines through most when Bruce is allowed to sit with the swelling, rolling darkness in his mind. When the film bypasses this—speeding through Bruce’s songwriting, his romantic merry-go-round meetups with Faye—the narrative turns cliche and anodyne. But when Bruce drives by his abandoned childhood home and the field in which he used to play and just stops the car to stare, you believe that he’s truly seeing ghosts.
“Deliver Me from Nowhere” is not a success story, though viewers will know from history that the risks Bruce took with Nebraska and with himself will prove themselves justified in the end. This is a portrait of a man at his lowest, who turns away from the promise of quick stardom to take an untrodden, untested road. This is Bruce falling with no one to catch him but himself, and this is the story of how he pulls himself out of a black hole until, at the very end of the tunnel, he is able to face up to his past and his present.
Bruce opens the film looking for “something real in all the noise.” Only at the climax, when he breaks down and cries, does the film finally give it to him.
Aarushi Bahadur can be reached at abahadur@wesleyan.edu.
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