SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE
Directed by: Scott Cooper
Starring: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Odessa Young
Rating: 7/10
“I’m just trynna find something real in all the noise,” mumbles Jeremy Allen White, all brooding, ursine intensity as Bruce Springsteen at the heart of Scott Cooper’s new biopic. “You find something real,” reassures Jeremy Strong as his manager Jon Landau, “I’ll deal with the noise.”
There’s a similar ambition to Deliver Me From Nowhere. Though there are wilder, noisier, more barnstorming chapters in the Springsteen biography, writer-director Cooper asks us to dial down the volume and focus on the Boss’s quietest, strangest, most revealing episode: the year of 1981–82, when he came off the road in the wake of his first top ten hit, rented a shag-pile apartment in Colts Neck, New Jersey, and began, against all commercial expectations, to channel eerie, echo-laden folk songs about the meanness at the heart of the world.
It’s a bold gambit (faithfully based on Warren Zanes’ deep-dive book) that cuts to the quick of Springsteen’s career and to the relationship it was founded on. Although there’s a perfunctory romance featuring the rather squandered Odessa Young as Faye, the bottle-blonde spirit of the Stone Pony, it’s this oddball bromance – between bruised heartland hero and buttoned-up nerd, united in their shared commitment to rock and roll integrity – that forms the true heart of the story.
It’s certainly the strongest part of the film, with the two Jeremys straining sinews and vocal cords (White looks little like Springsteen but attains an uncanny Bruce-like roar on an early “Born in the USA”) as they fight off self-doubt, second thoughts, suicidal freakouts to the sound of “Frankie Teardrop”, and interfering label execs. “In this office,” says Strong, as though pledging allegiance to the flag, the republic, mum and apple pie, “we believe in Bruce Springsteen.”
It’s a refreshing change from the usual grifters and slimeballs of on-screen rock management. But Cooper isn’t quite so assured at skirting other familiar hazards of the rock biopic. The film’s formative flashbacks to the 1950s feature a grim, black-and-white Stephen Graham as Douglas, the troubled Springsteen patriarch. It settles a little too comfortably into the photogenic shortcuts of artistic biography, where every childhood trauma is tied up neatly in the bow of song. And it rather misrepresents the most austere, pitiless album of Springsteen’s career by resolving into tearful hugs, therapy and Sam Cooke’s “The Last Mile of the Way”.
Still, there are moments of wonder. Back in Colts Neck, White-Bruce gazes into his busted-up Panasonic boombox playing the warped cassette of his home recordings, his songs emerging from the rumble and tape delay, and makes his own breakthrough. “That’s it,” he sighs. “It sounds like the past.”
