After dramatizing one of the most soul-searching chapters in Bruce Springsteen’s life, filmmaker Scott Cooper isn’t ready to put down the guitar just yet. The director behind “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” his intimate portrait of the making of Nebraska, says he’s already talking with the Boss himself about where the story could go next — and a sequel might not be far off.
Speaking to Variety, Cooper revealed that discussions with Springsteen have continued beyond the film’s release, hinting at the possibility of expanding the project into a larger cinematic chronicle. “There are so many chapters in Bruce’s life that are quite right for cinematic treatment,” Cooper said, noting that their collaboration on “Deliver Me From Nowhere” only scratched the surface of the songwriter’s turbulent creative evolution. “I suppose if you can make four Beatles movies, you can make a couple of Bruce Springsteen movies.”
“There are so many chapters in Bruce’s life, in all seriousness, that are quite right for cinematic treatment,” Cooper said, adding, “That’s something quite honestly that Bruce and I have discussed. I think he really loves this film. He’s loved the experience. I think he feels incredibly comfortable with someone telling a very painful chapter in his life. You’d have to ask him, but I think he’s ready for more.”
Released earlier this year, the film starred Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen and Paul Walter Hauser as longtime producer and E Street Band collaborator Jon Landau, tracing the quiet intensity of the Nebraska sessions — the lo-fi, haunted period when Springsteen retreated from arena stardom into a solitary artistic reckoning. Critics praised the film’s restraint and melancholy tone, framing it as a rare rock biopic that privileges introspection over iconography.
Now, Cooper seems eager to continue down that road. “Bruce and I have talked about other moments that might lend themselves to film,” he said. “There’s something incredibly cinematic about the contradictions in his life — the triumphs and the struggles, the relationship between fame and isolation.”
While Cooper stopped short of confirming which chapter he’d tackle next, the logical follow-up would trace Springsteen’s pivot from Nebraska’s bare-bones darkness to the bombastic heights of Born in the U.S.A. — a shift that turned him into a cultural touchstone and, paradoxically, deepened the personal conflicts that have fueled his music ever since. The director, who’s made a career of capturing wounded masculinity in films like “Out of the Furnace” and “Hostiles,” seems particularly suited to explore those contradictions.
Whether or not “Deliver Me From Nowhere” becomes the first entry in a series, the conversations between Cooper and Springsteen suggest a partnership that could keep deepening. For a filmmaker known for earthy, soulful Americana, and a musician whose songs are built on mythic versions of the same, it’s a collaboration that still has miles of road ahead.
