‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ (2025)
It was only a matter of time before the biopic machine made its way to The Boss. “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” takes its title from “State Trooper,” easily one of Bruce Springsteen’s darkest songs, and likewise paints a minor-key portrait of its subject. We first meet Springsteen in flashback as a timid young boy in Freehold, New Jersey, navigating the uneasy space between an abusive father (Stephen Graham) and a harried mother (Gaby Hoffman, also in Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind” in select theaters). “Deliver Me From Nowhere” then jumps to 1981, with a fully grown Bruce now played by Jeremy Allen White of the chef drama “The Bear.” As the film has it, The Boss is at something of a crossroads, famous enough to be recognized on the street but not so big that he can’t regularly sit in with his buddies at the fabled Stone Pony in Asbury Park. Daunted by his imminent superstardom, Springsteen retreats to a rented cabin with a four-track tape recorder, feverishly writing and recording the tracks that would become his stripped-down masterpiece “Nebraska.”
Director Scott Cooper (“Black Mass,” “The Pale Blue Eye,” “Crazy Heart”) is wise to limit the scope of his film to a specific moment rather than stage a full life story, but “Deliver Me From Nowhere” still falls prey to beats that were already stale when they were lampooned in “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” (2007): the overwrought childhood flashbacks, the pensive songwriting montages, a forlorn love interest played by Odessa Young (“Shirley”). White certainly looks the part, but he’s playing the stoic, soulful Bruce Springsteen of the album covers, with little of the easy charisma and sly humor that are so essential to The Boss’ magnetism. For a film about a performer as energetic as Springsteen, “Deliver Me From Nowhere” is strangely dour and listless, spending so much time on the artist’s struggles with depression that it becomes a one-note slog. Cooper does an apt job of explaining what makes “Nebraska” so special, contrasting it against Springsteen’s more conventional anthems (including “Born in the U.S.A.,” which was recorded simultaneously) and getting into the technical nitty-gritty of its lo-fi mystique. Even this, however, runs counter to Springsteen’s insistence that the album stand on its own feet. “I don’t want to explain it,” Springsteen protests when his manager insists on a press tour, “I don’t know if I can.” If only more biopic directors took a similar tack.
At Landmark Kendall Square Cinema, 355 Binney St., Cambridge; Apple Cinemas Cambridge, 168 Alewife Brook Parkway, Cambridge Highlands near Alewife and Fresh Pond; and AMC Assembly Row 12, 395 Artisan Way, Assembly Square, Somerville.
Oscar Goff is a writer and film critic based in Somerville. He is film editor and senior critic for the Boston Hassle and his work has appeared in the monthly Boston Compass newspaper and publications such as WBUR’s The ARTery and iHeartNoise. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.
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