Alexis Petridis 

Bossing it! The makers of Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere on turning Jeremy Allen White into the rock icon

Springsteen’s 1982 lo-fi album Nebraska was recorded when the singer was battling with depression – but about to become a superstar. Now that pivotal period has been brought to the screen – with The Boss’s approval
  
  

Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me from Nowhere.
Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me from Nowhere. Photograph: Macall Polay/20th Century Studios

Two years ago, film director Scott Cooper and writer Warren Zanes were summoned to Bruce Springsteen’s house in New Jersey. In a sense, the meeting was a surprise: as Cooper notes, Springsteen was known for “saying no to every overture about making a film of his life since 1986”. But something about the screenplay Cooper had written had clearly piqued his interest. It was based on Zanes’ book Deliver Me from Nowhere, not a traditional career-spanning biography, but a forensically researched history of Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska, which Zanes calls “the greatest left-turn performed by someone who is operating at the top of the charts in musical history”.

Released between Springsteen’s first US No 1 album, 1980’s The River, and the world-conquering Born in the USA in 1984, it was a stark, lo-fi collection of demo-quality home recordings made in the singer’s bedroom while he was battling depression. Its songs were haunted by the ghosts of the 1950s teenage serial killer Charles Starkweather and the Italian-American mobster Philip Testa, and by Springsteen’s strained relationship with his father, a remote, hard-drinking blue-collar worker, whose paranoid schizophrenia was only diagnosed later in his life.

Its echo-laden sound occasionally bore less resemblance to the heartland rock that had made Springsteen famous and more to the notoriously confrontational electronic punk duo Suicide. Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau’s first reaction to the album was to suggest Springsteen seek “professional help” from a psychiatrist, which he subsequently did. He also declined to promote the album, refusing to give interviews or tour. It was, unexpectedly, a top five hit on both sides of the Atlantic.

It’s an intriguing story, albeit one fraught with challenges for a film-maker: after all, as Cooper notes, it is essentially the story of someone writing and recording an album alone, in their bedroom. “How do you capture the writing process in a cinematic way? How do you capture what a man is dealing with when he’s alone in his bedroom? How do you make the silence cinematic? How do you make a story about a man who is very interior, and who is unravelling, cinematic?”

Still, the omens for their meeting augured well. Springsteen seemed enthusiastic. Moreover, he appeared to be in good spirits, despite suffering from a peptic ulcer, greeting them with some cheesesteak sandwiches that, Zanes wryly suggested, seemed to speak loudly of a career that’s involved selling more than 140m records: “very high-quality steaks with some sharp cheddar melted on them, held between two slices of toasted artisanal bread – no one stopped at Subway to pick these up.”

But fancy sandwiches notwithstanding, Cooper found the experience “nerve-wracking”. For one thing, he’d been a huge Springsteen fan for decades: he had got into the habit of listening to Nebraska and 1995’s similarly stark The Ghost of Tom Joad while writing screenplays. “I listened to them while I wrote two films I made with Christian Bale, Out of the Furnace and Hostiles, because they’re about men who are at times afraid to say out loud what they’re dealing with, what they’re capable of in the dark, things that give voice to their pain, and [the albums] speak to the loneliness that American men are enduring and a kind of spiritual devastation.”

For another, he now had to read the script out in front of Springsteen and Landau, “who are both cinephiles. Before he was Bruce’s manager, Jon Landau wasn’t just a rock critic, he was a film critic, he was married to Janet Maslin from the New York Times for years. These men know movies. So I’m at Bruce’s house, and I’m reading the screenplay aloud, all the dialogue and all of the action. Every so often, Bruce or Jon would say something and I’d quickly jot it down, just to correct something I’d written, make it more authentic. And then, at the end of it, I remember Bruce hugging me and saying: ‘This is it – let’s go.’ At that point, I knew we were off and running.” He laughs. “Once I’d regained my sea legs.”

Indeed, Springsteen’s enthusiasm for Deliver Me from Nowhere is hard to miss. Unlike Bob Dylan, who gave last year’s acclaimed biopic A Complete Unknown his blessing, then a very wide berth indeed (he didn’t even attend the premiere), Springsteen has turned up at film festivals to promote it, telling the audience at Colorado’s Telluride festival that he’d finally broken the habit of a lifetime and agreed to the making of a biopic because “I’m old and I don’t give a fuck what I do now”, jumping on stage in New York in order to praise the actors’ performances, launch another of his broadsides against Donald Trump and sing his 1999 track Land of Hope And Dreams.

Long before that, he was a regular visitor to the film set – obsessive Springsteen fans being what they are, you can find an itemised list of dates he showed up online. Cooper says his presence helped “ensure authenticity every step of the way”. Odessa Young, who plays Springsteen’s fictional love interest Faye, was absolutely delighted by his appearance. “I got to hang out with the greatest musical idol of my life and ask him a bunch of questions,” she says. “To see him walk into [legendary New Jersey club] the Stone Pony on the day we were shooting there and reach behind the counter and crack a beer, and just be like, a guy in his hometown – it was amazing.”

Nevertheless, it’s perhaps worth sparing a thought for Jeremy Allen White. The star of The Bear was Cooper’s first pick for the movie’s starring role. He talks about him as “one of the greatest actors of his generation”, with a combination of “humility and swagger” that mirrors the film’s subject: without wishing to sound mercenary, the fact that The Bear helped make White a huge and immediately recognisable star – the New Yorker described the response to White’s ad campaign for Calvin Klein as “a frenzy” – doubtless doesn’t harm the film’s commercial appeal.

White was a non-musician prior to taking on the role of Springsteen – he says he spent “month after month” taking lessons, beset by the thought that “there’s no way I’m capable of this and this is never going to come together”. Having finally mastered both the guitar and a hugely impressive evocation of Springsteen’s singing voice, he found himself in the unenviable position of having to pretend to be Bruce Springsteen in front of Bruce Springsteen.

“There is an incredible weight to playing any real and especially living person,” he says. “That sense of responsibility is always going to be stronger and larger, especially when you are dealing with someone like Bruce who is known and loved by so many. I think in the beginning I was almost too concerned with my understanding of Bruce or the public’s understanding of Bruce and it was kind of paralysing at the start.

“After getting through that initial fear, I realised the only way to go about it and get in was to take Bruce Springsteen out of it and approach it as a young man who is a musician on the brink of this global stardom, who is trying to make a record and be inspired, while visiting his past and his home and his relationship to his family dynamics and trying to figure out what the future would hold … In order to get started, I almost had to forget him for a moment.”

Of course, forgetting Bruce Springsteen is easier said than done when Bruce Springsteen is literally watching what you’re doing. “I think in the first week, it was difficult for me because I think my job as an actor is to try and shake the fraudulence that you might feel. It’s difficult to shake that stuff when you’re faced with the man you are playing. It’s hard to get lost and pretend at times and sync into your own reality and fake environment, however beautifully it’s crafted. That first week was tough, but then he became a sort of guide, even in silence with me. I thought he was there to tell me what was right or wrong about how things happened, but as time went on, I realised that he was there to give me and Scott and all of us permission to make the film. I also quickly realised, however fragile I was feeling at times having Bruce there, how Bruce felt just as fragile, if not more, witnessing the recreation of those moments that he experienced in isolation and loneliness.”

White says Springsteen rarely interacted with him on set, but in the evenings would text him, “picking out the smallest of moments, a glance, the way I was seated or listening to someone else, just moments that were particularly true or honest to him. At the end of the [working] day, I would feel pretty beat up and doubtful oftentimes. So that all went a long way.”

Whatever their interactions, the performance worked: White has been tipped for an Oscar, for his role in a film that, in one sense at least, is very much a period piece, an evocation of both a moment in Springsteen’s career and an era in pop music that have both long receded into history. As Zanes points out, Nebraska was released into “the dawn of the digital era”, a world where the compact disc was about to be launched, and MTV was just beginning to gain traction – two developments that Nebraska chafed against, with its rough sound, cover featuring a photo not of Springsteen but a dark landscape through a car window and a video for single Atlantic City that Springsteen only acquiesced to on condition that he didn’t appear in it.

Meanwhile, the doubts its author felt in 1982 about the prospect of superstardom had clearly been banished by the time he released Born In The USA in 1984, with its pop-oriented sound and iconic videos prominently featuring a newly muscled-up Springsteen: it was the first compact disc manufactured in the US for commercial release, became the bestselling album of 1985 and turned Springsteen into the global megastar he’s been ever since.

And yet, Zanes says, period piece or not, something about Nebraska and its making seems to speak to a more modern era. For one thing, he sees it as an album with a huge impact on subsequent rock music, that made “people open to the possibilities of stepping out of the commercial recording facility and seeing where else”: his book quotes Matt Berninger of the National calling it “the big bang of indie rock that was about making shit alone in your bedroom … every band that went after a lo-fi, DIY kind of thing – Pavement, Silver Jews, Guided by Voices, all the early indie stuff. It’s like when [Bon Iver] made For Emma, Forever Ago – I’m sure they were trying to make their version of Nebraska.”

For another, Zanes suggests the story of Springsteen labouring away in his bedroom, and the unvarnished album that emerged as a result, has a broader resonance in 2025. “I look at my own kids and what they’re listening to and everything has tuned vocals – I’m not talking about autotune, I’m taking about what happens in studios with engineers looking at waveforms so even if they can’t hear an imperfection, they can see it, and who isn’t going to fix something that looks wrong. We’re all fixers … the world of social media, online dating – you can really tweak your profile and avoid the risk of turning red, being seen wearing the wrong thing, having your hair look a little fucked-up. And the problem with all of this is that we’re putting layers between ourselves and the next person.

“But Nebraska is this emblem of ‘this is me, this is where I am at, and due to its imperfections, it’s going to be a little closer to the truth of my moment’. So it’s a story about 1982, but it’s also a story about right now. I hope one thing the movie does is make us all think about going out the door less than perfect and slightly more human because of it.”

• Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is released in the UK, US and Australia on 24 October

 

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