The genre of the musical biopic is one that, as Timothée Chalamet acknowledged while accepting a Sag award for playing Bob Dylan earlier this year, “could be perhaps tired”. The beats of the genre – the initial obstacles, the double-edged sword of success, the actors’ pursuit of industry awards for spirited impersonation – are by now so familiar that you’re almost expected to enter with more than a bit of skepticism, even when the artist at hand is one as widely beloved as Bruce Springsteen.
Like A Complete Unknown, in which Chalamet portrayed Dylan from 1961 until his pivot to electric in 1965, Deliver Me from Nowhere, Springsteen’s authorized biopic starring Jeremy Allen White, tries to thread a difficult needle between offering the standard treats and subverting expectations, between narrativizing genius and resisting hagiography. This may be an impossible task, given that the magic and cliches of popular music often go hand in hand, and Deliver Me from Nowhere certainly has its spoof-worthy moments. I went in braced for success montages, leaden flashbacks and capital-R Realizations, and at times met them. (Though to be clear, the expected treat of watching White, of the Bear and Calvin Klein underwear ad fame, tear up the stage as The Boss is still exactly that.) But more often I was won over by its diversions in form – its specificities, its smallness and its portrait of mental fragility.
That’s largely down to its rewardingly limited scope. Based on the book by Warren Zane (and informed by Springsteen’s 2016 memoir), Deliver Me from Nowhere burrows into a pivotal phase of life for both rockstars and civilians: the early 30s, when the excuses of youth start running out and demons start catching up. The bulk of the film takes place in 1981, when Springsteen returns to New Jersey after touring his first number one record, The River, on the brink of superstardom but burned out. Record execs at Columbia (embodied by David Krumholtz) want him to strike with more hits while the iron is hot; Bruce, played by White as hollow behind the brown-eye contacts, wants to hole up in a rental house in Colts Neck and tinker with the ideas that will become his 1982 album Nebraska, a folk-tinged acoustic album full of blue collar workers, outlaws, and other downtrodden outsiders in the heartland.
The story of Springsteen’s hard left artistic turn, inspired by Flannery O’Connor stories and TV dramas, is certainly an interesting one. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to visualize the churn of one person’s brain on fire, the ups and downs of the creative process; we end up spending a lot of time watching Bruce write lyrics in black marker indicative of overstatement – “Why???,” he writes when looking at an old headline about Charles Starkweather, whose 1958 murder spree inspired the title track. (It’s because he was “mad at the world”.) Perfunctory, too, are the black-and-white flashbacks to his working class childhood in nearby Freehold, which communicate the scarring fear of his alcoholic, abusive father (Stephen Graham), the explosive fights with his mother (Gaby Hoffmann). Same for scenes in which Bruce’s beloved manager Jon Landau (Succession’s Jeremy Strong) acts as buffer between commercial expectations and Bruce’s refusal of it.
It’s hard, in the film’s first half, to see past Strong and White’s respective on-screen reputations, each different strains of broodingly serious. In literal tone and line delivery, they’re not terribly far removed from their most famous characters. White, in particular, takes some getting used to, the familiar ticks of Chef Carmy’s red-hot anxiety occasionally peeking through Bruce’s cool avoidance. But he eventually settles into character, especially as Bruce’s depression spirals into panic post-recording.
Deliver Me From Nowhere picks up steam in this aftermath of genius, as Bruce’s team scramble to preserve the haunted sound of his Colts Neck bedroom demos despite all market sense. The film’s lingering focus on the technical process of recording, how cassette limitations begot a beloved sound – what Brian Eno called the “sound of failure” – is a surprising highlight, at least for this viewer nostalgic for CDs. Meanwhile, Bruce’s mental health crumbles along with his relationship with local waitress Faye (Odessa Young), the film’s only composite character given one standout scene to rise above her parenthetical role exemplifying Bruce’s penchant for disappearance and need of professional help.
Deliver Me from Nowhere thankfully avoids overly mythologizing the Boss – we see him on stage just a handful of times, in flashes; he walks around New Jersey mostly unrecognized and unbothered, the trappings of major celebrity the subject of another film. Arguably the film’s most idealized sequence – the recording of Born in the USA, also written in that bedroom – briefly blazes by like a comet; the cut ended up sitting on the shelf for three years, its popularity and political legacy outside the scope of this film. Deliver Me From Nowhere ends before that – the wins and wounds of one landmark, heart-wrenching album still fresh. I floated out of the theater to Nebraska’s rueful highlight Atlantic City, and haven’t wanted to stop listening to it since, stuck in its Americana groove – which is perhaps, ultimately, what we want from a biopic.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is screening at the New York film festival and will be released in Australian cinemas on 23 October and in the US and UK on 24 October
