In retrospect, Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska — a collection of personal and sometimes gloomy songs recorded solo, on a simple four-track cassette — seems a bold but fairly sensible move for that point in his career. His double album from 1980, The River, was the smashing conclusion to a trio of powerhouse records recorded with the E-Street Band, following the rugged and brilliant Darkness on the Edge of Town from 1978 and his declaration-of-greatness from 1975, Born To Run. The messianic aura growing around him must have felt dangerous. The logic of backlash was in place. From that perspective, making a lower-key musical statement looks a natural and even canny decision.
But it didn’t look that way from the perspective of Columbia Records. Sales of The River, Springsteen’s biggest album at that point, had made them greedy for more. They wanted another River, an even bigger River. Why would Springsteen squander his steamrolling momentum with this? You’d expect a record company to have these worries. They’re in the money-printing business.
Springsteen the artist might have worried as well. Those stripped-down songs could have come off as self-indulgent or solipsistic, exposing him as a gross pretender — the fake Dylan his earliest detractors said he was. But it wasn’t a bad record. It wasn’t even just a good record. It was a great record. Its downtempo songs — such as the murder-story that opens the album, “Nebraska”, and the gorgeously twangy “Used Cars” — echo with unbearable melancholy, and they’re just beautifully sung. Its uptempo songs — especially “Open All Night” and “State Trooper” — flirt with madness itself in their settings of night-time delirium and their ghostly, howling vocals. This greatness has become even clearer in the 43 years since that low-key release by reluctant Columbia Records — which happened, per Springsteen’s orders, with no press, no tour, and no single.
Alas, Nebraska’s greatness presents an unpleasant challenge to Bruce Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, the movie dramatising its creation from writer-director Scott Cooper. For one thing, a striking feature of Nebraska is how cinematic it is. Springsteen was already a storytelling songwriter, but one couldn’t know how much the forceful production of his earlier records limited their cinematic feel until he fully tore away the wall of sound. The echoing starkness of Nebraska – songs recorded not with a band in a studio but alone in a room in a house in the country — makes its imagery and sentiment far more vivid and affecting, more movie-like than even “Jungleland”, the long and extremely movie-ish street epic that concludes Born to Run.
This means that a dramatic movie about Nebraska would have to be quite good to be more cinematically compelling than the album itself. Deliver Me From Nowhere is a nice-looking film, and it has a good heart, but it’s dramatically underpowered, somewhat dull. It begins as Springsteen (played by The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White) concludes his triumphant two-year, worldwide tour supporting The River and covers the months in which the songs on Nebraska were written and recorded and presented as a fait accompli to Columbia Records. The emotional core of the film, though, rests in its black-and-white flashbacks to Springsteen’s Fifties boyhood, which focus on his sweet Oedipal love for his doting mother and his failed relationship with his troubled father. These flashbacks serve as both literal background for several of Nebraska’s songs and explanation for the psychological torments that visit Springsteen as he makes his unusual record.
The temptation with biopics is always to make their action and dialogue unnaturally expository, with characters hurrying to insert the biographical details in their lines so that less-informed audience members can leave with a half-decent sense of why this person was important enough to make a movie about in the first place. But Deliver Me From Nowhere faces an added challenge because it’s also the somewhat complicated story of a recording team trying to make a conventional rock album when the artist has a primal attachment to his original demo tape.
There’s the business side of this too: Columbia executives kvetching about audiences and sales to Bruce’s manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), and Landau arguing back on behalf of Bruce’s inchoate vision. There’s also the songwriting side: Bruce stalking around inside his rented house while murmuring songs and strumming a guitar, like a man whose career as a troubadour was cut short by agoraphobia.
And there is the technical side, which, for anyone who knows and loves Nebraska, is hugely important. So you have Bruce interacting with his four-track cassette recorder and a boombox and various studio guys and the one old-fashioned record-presser who might be able transfer the songs from his precious cassette onto vinyl with their haunted atmosphere intact. The E Street Band shows up for an attempt to work those muted songs into studio form, but the famous bandmembers are treated like extras. None of them says anything. There’s no time.
There’s no time because the movie has to work in all the stuff about the artist’s life that informed the artist’s art. But, thanks to the complicated storyline where they try to make a regular album from songs on the demo tape and then just decide to go with the demo tape, there’s not enough time for the life stuff either. If the usual biopic is the careful scalpelling of a life into an artificially coherent story, Deliver Me From Nowhere is battlefield surgery.
“If the usual biopic is the careful scalpelling of a life into an artificially coherent story, Deliver Me From Nowhere is battlefield surgery.”
A doomed hometown romance plays out in an elliptical scatter of scenes, which are filled with dialogue that’s both tender and totally pre-packaged, while Bruce conveys his Bruceness by speaking almost entirely in Bruce-ish aphorisms. It speaks to his enduring appeal as a cultural figure, and it testifies to the real mix of humility and grandiose ambition and huge talent that makes his best music some of the best popular music there is, that this is almost believable. Jeremy Allen White is generally an asset in this portrayal, though sometimes, in his attempt to capture how Bruce’s bottled-up passion comes through in his speech, he goes too heavy on the bottled-up part, so that audience-members who don’t know better might come away thinking Bruce Springsteen has a mild form of cerebral palsy.
But beyond its biopic storytelling, a larger disappointment in the film is philosophical. There’s an ominous moment early on where Landau consults with his wife about Bruce’s suffering in that empty house. He seems to be tapping into some depth of inner bleakness in these new songs, Landau says. In response Landau’s wife — this is what’s ominous — gives him a soft, caring look while kneading her hands with conspicuous vigour, as if she’s trying to open as many empathy channels as she can. It’s ominous, in a movie striving to portray the spirit of artistic creation, because this woman emits a suspiciously familiar aura of psychotherapy. Indeed, when her husband is finished she tilts her listening head like a therapist and says, “It sounds like he’s pushing boundaries that you need to acknowledge.” In other words, a psychotherapeutic lexicon from the present day is forcing its way into this movie drama set in 1981. At different moments in my thinking about this film, Jon Landau’s empathic wife has struck me as an anachronism and as a time traveller. She’s either a failure of historical consistency or she’s a visitor from 2025 who’s come to let 1981 know it’s okay to seek professional help.
Deliver Me From Nowhere has those other storylines competing for space in its two-hour running time, but it is ultimately and a little didactically about Bruce Springsteen being more damaged by his relationship with his dad than he realises, and then getting the professional help he needs.
The banality of the therapy plot stands out even more because of the other artistic spirits the movie conjures, Springsteen’s deepest influences when he was making Nebraska. The title song’s lyrics — and much of the album’s dark mood – were inspired by Terrence Malick’s 1973 film Badlands, about a pair of real-life teenagers who went on a killing spree in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1957. But Springsteen was also under the heavy influence of Flannery O’Connor at the time. In the film, the fat volume of O’Connor’s collected stories is prominent on a coffee table in Springsteen’s rented house, and in one agitated moment Bruce is shown opening the book to O’Connor’s most famous story, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” This lets us know that, when Springsteen’s killer in “Nebraska” explains himself by saying, “I guess there’s just a meanness in this world”, Bruce is directly citing the Misfit, O’Connor’s killer in “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, who tells his last victim that “there’s no pleasure but meanness” in the world.
This would have some philosophical coherence and thematic force if Deliver Me From Nowhere showed that Springsteen was depressed because he was wrestling with the problem of inexpiable evil — which is what O’Connor was constantly wrestling with. But instead it tells us Springsteen was depressed because he was wrestling with hard feelings about his dad, which were tricky in their own way but expiable, finally, with the help of a competent mental health professional from Los Angeles. The father theme has real weight, and it generates the most moving scenes in the film, as it’s generated several of Springsteen’s most powerful songs. But the movie’s tidy resolution takes this personal conflict as the entirety of its subject matter, as if the other torments that gave birth to Nebraska were resolved by that mental health professional as well.
Which might make you ask: What happened to evil? What happened to Flannery O’Connor? Surely the dark visitations and haunted thoughts provoked by these deeper matters were not so easily dissolved in the scented waters of psychotherapy. Actually, asking these questions makes me not want answers to them, at least answers from the film, or even from Bruce Springsteen, at least the happier Springsteen who recovered from his New Jersey torment in California, the Springsteen who’s ready to reconcile with his imperfect dad by the end of Deliver Me From Nowhere. I’m grateful to this movie for the background it gave me about the making of Nebraska, and for motivating me to listen to a ton of Springsteen. But I will choose to preserve my admiration for that music by not thinking about it from this movie’s perspective.
The movie did give me some other useful background information about Bruce’s career around that time. Until seeing it, for example, I didn’t realise that the best songs on his next great record, Born In The U.S.A., were written during the same pained and lonely trial that gave us Nebraska. From this I infer my own tidy and telling story about art and psychotherapy, which eclipses the one that Delivery Me From Nowhere conveys — about Bruce getting the therapy he needed to feel better. Knowing that Born in the U.S.A. was largely written before he had his fateful encounter with that LA shrink, I now understand an important turning point in his career. Bruce Springsteen, on the verge of completing an astonishing run of five great albums in row, got the therapy he needed to feel better, and he never made a great album again.
