Why Deliver Me From Nowhere barely features Bruce Springsteen’s famous band E Street

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If you go into “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” expecting lots of concert scenes, prepare to be disappointed. The film follows the Boss (Jeremy Allen White of “The Bear”) during a more isolated period in his life where his depression seemed unbeatable. He channeled his haunted feelings into his 1982 album, “Nebraska.”

The film opens with a grayscale scene from Springsteen’s childhood. We first see Springsteen in the film’s present as he and the E Street Band perform “Born to Run” in concert, at the end of their tour promoting the 1980 album “The River.”

You can see the band members from afar, like the late saxophonist Clarence Clemons (Judah Sealy), drummer Max Weinberg (Brian Chase) and guitarist Steven Van Zandt (Johnny Cannizzaro) — if you’re not a music fan, you might know Little Steven best as Silvio Dante on “The Sopranos.”

Then it’s all for the E Street Band in “Deliver Me From Nowhere.” They reappear briefly during the recording sessions for “Nebraska”, but neither of them says a word to Bruce. As the film recounts, Springsteen wrote and recorded “Nebraska” alone with a multi-track recorder rather than with his band. When he went to record the songs with the E Street Band, he found that the rock ‘n’ roll took away the melancholy and rawness of his home recordings of the songs. So these home recordings are the ones that were used for the wide release of “Nebraska.”

“Nebraska” is a Bruce Springsteen album, but not an E Street Band album. The band is barely in the movie because it’s not an album Bruce made with them. If the movie was called “Born to Run” or “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” it would be a different story.

The E Street Band is a big part of the Bruce Springsteen story, but not this chapter. “Deliver Me From Nowhere” focuses on Bruce’s relationships not with his bandmates, but with his manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) and with his fictional girlfriend Faye Romano (Odessa Young).

In his video “The Broken Formula of Musical Biopics,” video essayist Patrick Willems argued that the best biopics are those that focus on a specific moment. If you don’t need to condense someone’s life into a few hours, then it’s less tempting to resort to shorthand and clichés. “Deliver Me From Nowhere” takes this approach by adapting Warren Zanes’ 2023 book of the same title and not, say, Springsteen’s 2016 autobiography “Born to Run.” (“Nebraska” occupies a short three-page chapter of this one.)

“Nebraska” is a pivotal moment in Springsteen’s life and career, an album and period filled with powerful emotions. However, I doubt that this is the best time to make a film about it. In his segment on WBUR’s “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” critic Sean Burns noted that as compelling a story as “Nebraska’s” writing is, it’s also not cinematic. There are many scenes of Bruce walking or reading alone, with the audience deprived of compelling action to supplement or enliven his thoughts.

This year, former Springsteen biographer Peter Ames Carlin (author of 2012’s “Bruce”) published “Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run,” about Springsteen and the E Street Band’s crucial third album. Maybe they should have waited and used this story, which features the E Street Band, as the basis for the Springsteen biopic.

“Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” is playing in theaters.