This Boss-olatrous film only partly escapes music-movie cliches. This happens when Bruce Springsteen finally leaves his New Jersey heartland, and sees a shrink in shallow LA where he has bought a house. Otherwise, it’s all chunks of expositional dialogue (“I’m just trying to find something real in the noise!” “It’s like he’s channelling something deeply personal!”), black-and-white flashbacks to his tough upbringing, scenes in the recording studio with producers and execs looking on wonderstruck behind the glass while the magic happens. And there’s some very strange stuff about Bruce’s romantic life.
Jeremy Allen White does an intelligent, committed job as Springsteen; Jeremy Strong gives of his considerable best with the thanklessly dull role of Bruce’s manager and friend Jon Landau, and Stephen Graham is Springsteen’s abusive but troubled dad Douglas with whom Springsteen finally comes to terms. In fact White and Graham have the film’s best scene, a scene so weird that it must surely be true. Springsteen’s old dad, waiting humbly and penitently in the Boss’s dressing room after the show, asks Bruce in a voice filled with pathos to sit on his knee and Springsteen has to point out gently that he is a grown man and has in fact never done this before in his life, not even as a kid.
The meat 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 house. It was an artistic indulgence which the record company nervously permitted because they had in their back pocket the thrilling track that would later make Springsteen stratospheric: Born in the USA. The album is inspired by figures as various as Flannery O’Connor and notorious Nebraska spree killer Charles Starkweather, the model for Martin Sheen in Terrence Malick’s film Badlands. It’s also about whether you should embrace or escape your home town.
It’s all unexceptional enough; but the film also invents for Springsteen an imaginary girlfriend called Faye Romano, played by Odessa Young, supposedly the sister of a guy from the old neighbourhood; she has a daughter from a former relationship. Springsteen dates Faye in all her realness and integrity, but ultimately leaves her behind. So how about Faye’s daughter? She has been encouraged to think of Bruce as her stepdad, so will she one day think of Bruce in those heart-rending black-and-white flashback terms? Or are she and her mum just there to underscore Bruce’s caring blue-collar masculinity? The film is a derivative, if well intentioned, piece of fan fiction.
• Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is out on 23 October in Australia, and on 24 October in the UK and US.
