NYFF: Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere Isn’t So Boss

At least Bruce Springsteen doesn’t have to think about his whole life before he plays a show. He plays a lot of shows, usually upward of three hours, so that would be a lot of reminiscing to add to his schedule. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere attempts to heed the conventional wisdom of a post-Walk Hard world, where spoofs are supposed to have eliminated the need or audience desire for a particularly cliché-ridden genre (since when?), and do the honorable thing: focus on a smaller sliver of a famous pop musician’s life, in order to better illuminate a particular turning point, artistic breakthrough, and so on. This approach has become a cliché unto itself, which is why Deliver Me From Nowhere plays so much like a movie hastily greenlit in the wake of last year’s Dylan picture A Complete Unknown, even though it actually got started well before that movie was released.

Really, though: Same studio, similar style of sensitive-masculinity journeyman director (Scott Cooper instead of James Magnold), even a transition between acoustic and electric music, though here the Dylan maneuver is reversed, with Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) reeling from a top-ten single off The River and deciding to scale way back for his next project. Yes, this is a whole movie about the making of the spare, hushed, critic-fave Springsteen album Nebraska, which in the context of all those overfamiliar life stories must feel like a record nerd’s fever dream. The movie studio has more reason for trusting this switch-up than the record company did at the time; in retrospect, it’s more clear that the story of Nebraska is also the story of Born in the USA, at least a little bit, so you get a muscular in-studio run-through of that record’s titular hit in between Springsteen recording in his bedroom.

Springsteen’s unexpected process back in 1982 forms a compelling core for the film, though Cooper doesn’t drill all the way into it. Back in New Jersey post-tour, Springsteen starts bumming around his home state. He’s still meeting with his manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) about next steps, but he spends downtime acting like he’s back in town for Thanksgiving: Driving around, including multiple trips to the darkened doorstep of his abandoned family home; playing old rock and roll classics at the Stone Pony; and dating Faye Romano (Odessa Young), the sister of a high school acquaintance, no less.

He also thinks about, well, not his whole life, but portions of his childhood, depicted in black-and-white flashbacks, with a long-suffering mother (Gaby Hoffman) and a heavy-drinking, bullying father (Stephen Graham). These scenes contribute both to Springsteen’s own mental health issues and his fear of them; it’s implied (and then stated, and then overstated) that he keeps Faye and her young daughter at arm’s length because of them. After ruminating on his unhappy childhood and catching Badlands during some late-night channel-surfing (and appearing to watch it repeatedly on what we can assume is one of those 24-hour Badlands stations), he starts to write a series of dark, despairing story songs. He records them at the Jersey house where he’s temporarily living, with help from engineer Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser), then challenges his studio compatriots with reproducing their sound, which he’s wary of smothering with further instrumentation, production, and so on.