Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere review – brooding and serious portrait of the Boss’ crisis years | Movie
This film Boss-olatrous only partly escapes the clichés of musical cinema. This happens when Bruce Springsteen finally leaves his heart of New Jersey and sees a shrink in the depths of Los Angeles where he has bought a house. Otherwise, it’s just bits of expository dialogue (“I’m just trying to find something real in the noise!” “It’s like he’s channeling something deeply personal!”), black-and-white flashbacks to his difficult upbringing, scenes in the recording studio with producers and executives marveling behind the glass as the magic happens. And there are some very strange things going on in Bruce’s romantic life.
Jeremy Allen White does a smart, engaging job as Springsteen; Jeremy Strong gives his best as Bruce’s manager and friend Jon Landau, and Stephen Graham is Springsteen’s abusive but troubled father Douglas, with whom Springsteen eventually gets along. In fact, White and Graham have the best scene in the film, one so bizarre that it must surely be true. Springsteen’s old father, waiting humbly and penitently in the Boss’s dressing room after the show, asks Bruce in a pathetic voice to sit on his lap and Springsteen has to gently point out that he is a grown man and has actually never done this before in his life, not even as a child.
The heart of the film’s drama is a key moment of emotional and artistic crisis in Springsteen’s life: the recording of his radically lo-fi acoustic album Nebraska in 1982, composed and largely recorded in the bedroom of his New Jersey home. It was an artistic indulgence that the record company nervously allowed because it had in its back pocket the thrilling track that would later make Springsteen stratospheric: Born in the USA. The album draws inspiration from figures as diverse as Flannery O’Connor and the notorious Nebraska Killer Charles Starkweather, the model for Martin Sheen in Terrence Malick’s film Badlands. It’s also about whether you should embrace or flee your hometown.
All this is nothing exceptional; but the film also invents an imaginary girlfriend for Springsteen named Faye Romano, played by Odessa Young, supposedly the sister of a guy from the old neighborhood; she has a daughter from a previous relationship. Springsteen dates Faye in all his reality and integrity, but ultimately leaves her behind. And Faye’s daughter? She’s been encouraged to think of Bruce as her stepfather, so will she ever think of Bruce in those heartbreaking black-and-white flashback terms? Or are she and her mother just there to emphasize Bruce’s benevolent working-class masculinity? The film is a derivative, albeit well-intentioned, piece of fan fiction.
