TELLURIDE – Bruce Springsteen is an American original. An artist whose influence on rock’ n’ roll and pop music will be felt for decades to come. The creative process behind one of his most acclaimed albums, frankly, one of the most acclaimed albums of all-time, is explored in the new autobiographic film “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” a world premiere at the 2015 Telluride Film Festival. But at its heart, the Scott Cooper-directed drama is about the complicated relationship between a son and a father.
Adapted from Warren Zanes’ 2023 novel “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” Cooper is not intent on telling the life story of “The Boss.” You won’t find out how he started singing or got his big break. Or even how he met his longtime manager and producer, Jon Landau, or formed the E-Street Band. To properly tell that story, you might need a series of films or a 10-episode limited series. Instead, the movie chronicles a specific period in Springsteen’s life after he finished a year of touring to support his album “The River,” and finds himself at a crossroads both creatively and personally. But that’s not where the film begins.
Cooper first takes us back to 1957, and Adele Springstreen (Gaby Hoffman) is driving her young son Bruce (Matthew Anthony Pellicano) to a neighborhood bar. A sheepish Bruce is charged with going inside and telling his potentially alcoholic father, Douglas (Stephen Graham), that Mom says it’s time to come home. You can see the inherent fear in his eyes after having to deliver the message. When the movie returns to the present day of 1981, Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) is performing “Born to Run” at the last tour stop in Cincinnati. He’s exhausted, but Landau (Jeremy Strong) has good news for him. He’s found him a house to rent in Colts Neck, New Jersey, where he can recuperate and contemplate whatever comes next (hint: a new album).
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Springsteen can’t get performing live out of his veins, however, and is soon sitting in on a local band’s set at The Stone Pony music club in Asbury Park, NJ. Something he’s done for years despite his newfound fame. After one jam, he runs into a former schoolmate who is intent on introducing his cousin, the beguiling Faye (Odessa Young). Even in those first few moments, Springsteen realizes she’s more than a typical groupie and takes her number.
Meanwhile, Landau is politely pressuring Springsteen to start writing the new album. Bruce is initially sparked by a television broadcast of Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” a drama inspired by the killing spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril-Ann Fugate in Nebraska. Springsteen becomes so intrigued that he goes to the local library to research their crimes (when was the last time you saw someone use a microfiche reader on screen?). As he goes down this road, he is revisited by childhood memories of his father and his parents’ combative relationship. They may now live all the way across the country in Los Angeles, but without the distraction of the road, they haunt him.
Slowly but surely, Bruce begins to put ideas for songs together, but convinces Landau not to waste money on figuring it out in a studio. Working with Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser), Springsteen records song demos on a four-track cassette recorder (unconventional at the time) and then mixes them on an Echoplex machine for an “echo” effect. This produces a sound that horrifies the record label at the time, but will become legendary. This aspect of Springsteen’s artistic exploration is one of Cooper’s most impressive accomplishments with “Nowhere.”
After recording 15 tracks, Springsteen sends the demo to Landau, who will eventually have to figure out how to convince Columbia Records to release “Nebraska,” a deeply personal album Bruce neither wants to tour, speak to the press about, or even put his face on the cover. The journey has been taxing for Springsteen, however, and despite Faye and her young daughter providing a fleeting ray of sunshine, he begins to spiral into a deep depression.
It goes without saying that Cooper has fashioned as unorthodox a biopic as you can imagine for a major studio release in 2025. Spoiler: There is no big musical performance at the end of the movie. In fact, outside of White singing live for the demos, there are just two major “numbers,” and one is in the recording studio. Again, the movie is more than a snapshot of Springsteen’s life, but it doesn’t completely suggest the scope or breadth of his career. But for those who have not read his 2016 autobiography or seen some of the select interviews he’s participated in over the years, it provides a portrait of a man in more pain than many of his fans ever suspected.
For every inspired scene, however, Cooper makes choices that hinder “Nowhere” from being a truly great film. The decision to show the flashbacks in black and white is decidedly dated, and there is too much dialogue that exists only as unnecessary or overexplained exposition (much of this falls to Strong’s feet to pull off as Landau). It’s so prevalent that it teeters on unintentionally insulting the audience. And despite a luminous turn by Young, Faye’s storyline tells us less about Springsteen than about an intriguing character who is a fictional composite of women Bruce was connected to. But, luckily, the depth of the songwriting process and two fantastic performances pull “Nowhere” across the figurative finish line.
He may only have four or five scenes, but Graham enriches the senior Springsteen with more gravitas than any prose any writer could fashion on the page. He’s genuinely fantastic. It’s White, though, whose performance and previously undiscovered musical talents carry “Nowhere.” Best known for his work on “The Bear,” White crafts an echo of Springsteen to call his own. There is little mimicry even in his excellent live singing, and he embodies Springsteen’s style almost flawlessly. For lack of a better turn of phrase, he is simply awesome. And away from the microphone, White captures the humility, grace, and often, emotional discomfort that Springsteen was experiencing during this chapter in his life.
That being said, the ending of “Nowhere” is disappointingly a bit too flat for comfort. And there may be too much left for the title cards to explain when the image fades. But there is a moment in the final act between Graham and White that will be hard to forget. A moment that is masterfully directed and performed with the utmost humanity. So much so that you almost wish the movie ended right then and there. [B]
“Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” opens nationwide on Oct. 24
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Editor-at-Large Gregory Ellwood is one of the entertainment industry's most respected journalists and critics. Based in Los Angeles, he's the only current awards expert who previously worked on Oscar campaigns at a major movie studio. Over the years, he has written for the LA Times, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Vox, among others. He also co-founded the entertainment news site HitFix, which spawned a legion of influential Emmy and WGA Award-winning alumni.
