It’s a hard thing, realising people aren’t who you want them to be.
Such a poignant, sincere line was first heard in the trailer for Scott Cooper’s new Bruce Springsteen biopic, which sees The Bear star Jeremy Allen White tasked with embodying ‘The Boss’. Yet, it wasn’t until I was sat captivated in the cinema that I heard the line afresh, stricken by how one compelling piece of dialogue can underpin the entirety of a film. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere charts the making of Springsteen’s classic, monumental 1982 album Nebraska. With a documentary-like feel at times, Cooper focuses in on Springsteen’s creative process behind the intimate, stripped-back album. But, to remain authentic to Springsteen’s experience, the film becomes much more than this, weighing in on how the making of Nebraska played into his psychology. A tortured soul, Springsteen is plagued by both a traumatic past and of expectations for his future, leading him to battlesomething much more difficult than conjuring up hits: depression.
Fresh off his tour with the E Street Band and on the verge of global stardom following his album The River, Springsteen isolates himself in a rental house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, unsure of what to do next. Finding himself in a liminal state, he surfs through New Jersey’s diners and coffee shops, plays covers with a band at the eminent Stone Pony music venue, races around in a shiny new car, and blasts records by musical duo Suicide. After an intertextual moment when, flipping through channels, Springsteen discovers Badlands, the 1973 cult classic following a young Michael Sheen traversing Midwest America on the run with his girlfriend (played by Sissy Spacek), his curiosity is awakened, culminating into the making of Nebraska. Yet, despite the eureka moment, Jeremy Allen White has immersed himself so deeply and convincingly into the role of a brooding, tormented musician by this point that the picture of isolation painted cannot be brushed past. Springsteen is chained to New Jersey, unable to move forward.
Inducing this lack of movement, Deliver Me From Nowhere is punctuated by black-and-white flashback scenes detailing Springsteen’s tough childhood in New Jersey. Cooper weaves through Springsteen’s memories of his father, Douglas ‘Dutch’ Springsteen (played by Stephen Graham), who is pictured stumbling home from the bar, yelling at his family, and smoking excessively. Harrowing scenes of abuse ensure Doug’s presence looms over the film. One distressing moment sees a young Springsteen forced to spar with his drunken father, who grows increasingly frustrated at his son’s mistakes until the point of physical abuse. In a later scene, Springsteen sneaks downstairs and hits his father with a baseball bat in an attempt to protect his mother, Adele (played by Gaby Hoffman). Doug towers over his son, portrayed through Springsteen’s fearful, youthful gaze, before congratulating him for fighting back and defending his mother in a deeply unsettling manner. Realising his father isn’t who he wants him to be holds a crippling effect over poor Springsteen, one that undoubtedly acts as a primary source of his depression and haunts him like a ghost.
In fact, Springsteen becomes a ghostly figure himself when he haunts the spots from these flashback scenes. Springsteen parks up outside his childhood home in the midst of the night, examining the building from across the street; he sits bitterly in the cinema where he had once watched films with his father, absently watching the screen in front of him; he eyes the mansion on the hill where his father took him to play as a child, the inspiration behind the nostalgic ballad ‘Mansion on the Hill’ from Nebraska itself. Springsteen becomes a stranger in his hometown. Perhaps this stems from the double-edged sword of his success as a musician as he moves from place to place – New York City, New Jersey, Los Angeles – andrental home to rental home. Or, most certainly from the emotional turmoil of his childhood that lingers over him like the smell of perfume.
Springsteen’s sense of inner turmoil is epitomised through the invention of Faye Romano (played by Odessa Young), a fictional character who acts as the amalgamation ofSpringsteen’s failed romantic relationships at the time. Springsteen’s short-term relationship with single mother Faye, in which he goes from whizzing her to fairgrounds in the middle of the night to pulling a disappearing act, highlights his struggles under the expectations of being who people want him to be. One night after disappointing Faye, Springsteen tears down a rural street, flooring the accelerator so that his sports car runs faster and faster, until he slams on the breaks and screams out in frustration. White’s raw emotion in a scene depicting near-suicide is a frightening watch. Springsteen is often seen in reflections throughout the film – the glass door of his rental home in Colts Neck, the side-view mirror of his car – suggesting how he is a man struggling to face himself in his attempts to outrun the past.
Yet, you can’t outrun the past. It’s a lesson we all learn at different points in our lives. Deliver Me From Nowhere’s pivotal scene comes toward the end of the film, when Springsteen has a panic attack at the El Paso Country Fair. Accompanied by dizzying camerawork and the sound of his loud, fast breathing, Springsteen hallucinates his younger self and his father in the midst of the panic attack, bringing the past to the present for a climactic moment. Subsequently, Springsteen is sparked into reaching out for help in fighting his internal battles; the striking image of him weeping at therapy lingers with us even as the credits roll. White’s performance is outstanding for providing us with insight into Springsteen’s interiority during his dark times, something that critics aren’t giving him much credit for. Deliver Me From Nowhere provides us with a glimpse into the man beneath the surface, of the artist in the midst of becoming ‘The Boss’ who we know him as today.
