Producers: Scott Cooper, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Eric Robinson and Scott Stuber Director: Scott Cooper Screenplay: Scott Cooper Cast: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham, Odessa Young, Gaby Hoffman, Marc Maron, David Krumholtz, Matthew Pellicano Jr., Johnny Cannizzaro, Grace Gummer, Chris Jaymes and Harrison Gilbertson Distributor: Disney/20th Century Studios
Grade: C
James Mangold and Timothėe Chalamet set a high bar for contemporary musical biography with last year’s “A Complete Unknown,” and Scott Cooper and Jeremy Allen White fall far short of it with “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere.”
Based on Warren Zanes’s 2023 book, “The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska,” it’s like Mangold’s film in that it centers on only a portion of the singer’s life. But while the earlier film focused on a pivotal turn in Bob Dylan’s career and stylistic choices, Cooper’s emphasizes how creating the uncompromisingly spare and personal 1982 album had a salubrious effect on Springsteen’s struggle with depression arising from his troubled childhood, in particular his relationship with his father Douglas (Stephen Graham). (Of course, as the film admits briefly toward the close, sessions with a therapist had something to do with it, too.)
As structured by Cooper, the narrative jumps back and forth between recreations of the experiences of Springsteen (White) in 1982 and flashbacks to memories of his childhood in New Jersey, in which he’s played by young Matthew Pellicano Jr. The latter emphasize the emotional swings of Douglas, who can be threatening to his wife Adele (Gabby Hoffmann) and stern with his son, but can also treat the boy to an afternoon movie or a ride into the country with Bruce’s sister Virginia (Arabella Olivia Clark).
The 1982 material follows Springsteen as he writes the songs that would make up the “Nebraska” album, records their demos in his home with some help from his friend Mike (Paul Walter Hauser) while discussing the project with his manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), and eventually decides to release the demos rather than re-record them with his band—to the dismay of his label’s executives, represented by David Krumholtz as Al Teller). His creative efforts are haunted, and affected, by those childhood memories, but the grimness of his recollections is alleviated somewhat by a simultaneous romance with waitress Faye Romano (a fictionalized composite played by Odessa Young), the sister of an old high school classmate, and by happy afternoons out with her and her young daughter.
That relationship ends, however, with his sudden decision to move to California, and during the cross-country drive with his friend Matt (Harrison Gilbertson), Springsteen suffers what amounts to a nervous breakdown. He begins therapy and a coda shows his career taking off with the release of “Born in the U.S.A.” in 1984 and him reconciling with his father backstage after a show.
The scenario pretty much guarantees that the film will be a fairly glum affair—stories about recovering from unhappy childhoods may be inspiring, but they’re rarely cheery—but it needn’t mean that it will be quite so boring. Cooper hasn’t found a way to enliven the scenes of Springsteen’s creating his song list—merely showing him scribbling down titles and lyrics doesn’t do the trick, especially since White just mopes around, rousing himself to dissatisfaction only when trying to improve his homemade tapes in the recording studio. And if course we’re simply told what a groundbreaking album “Nebraska” was; one can’t quote reviews or fan reaction.
There’s a bit more life in the scenes between Bruce and Faye, on the one hand, and Bruce and Landau on the other. That’s because Young and Strong prove able partners for White, the former with vivacity that finally turns into resentment over being tossed aside, and the latter with an intense protectiveness that the actor communicates with subtle understatement. No one else in the 1982 scenes amounts to much more than window dressing.
In the 1950s flashbacks, young Pellicano is appropriately somber and watchful, even in a scene when Bruce ineffectually attacks his father with a baseball bat to protect Adele. But Graham makes a disappointingly flat Douglas; while one appreciates reticence in depicting the ups-and-downs of a mentally challenged man, the impact is muted into virtual nonexistence.
As he’s often done in the past, Cooper opts for a relatively grungy realistic look, which production designer Stefania Cella and cinematographer Masanobu Tayayanagi manage well, distinguishing between the 1957 and 1982 sequences by shifts from color to hazy near black-and-white, which makes matters relatively easy for the languid editing of Pamela Martin. Costume designer Kasia Walicka Maimone contributes to the period feel nicely as well, with particular attention to Springsteen’s dark eighties off-stage look.
Cooper has also eagerly embraced the fact that the “Nebraska” songs show cinematic references, with explicit nods to Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” and Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter.” He includes substantial clips from both in the course of the picture. In the case of Malick’s film, he correctly shows Springsteen fascinated by Martin Sheen’s fictionalized depiction of killer Charles Stakweather, which he watches on television. He takes liberties in using “Hunter,” however, inserting an episode in which Douglas takes young Bruce to see the film in a New Jersey theatre, apparently in 1957. In reality, of course, Laughton’s film, since reappraised as a masterpiece, was released in 1955 and was a resounding flop; the idea that it would be shown two years later in a single screen theatre in New Jersey and attract any audience at all is completely implausible. It seems that in this case artistic license trumps chronology.
Perhaps a bit more artistic license elsewhere in “Deliver Me From Nowhere” would have made for a more interesting movie.