Copyright gq
This story contains mild spoilers for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. I’m a big Bruce Springsteen fan. Having written about his music, I think I might even be allowed to call myself a professional Bruce Springsteen fan. So when a new biopic—Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, starring Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen—was announced, I was very excited to see how the cinematic treatment might introduce legions of new-fans-in-waiting to the genius of The Boss and his music. Then I saw the film. In a word: bad. In two words: really bad. In relating the story of Springsteen refusing to capitalize on the enormous success of The River to instead record Nebraska, a commercially-unfriendly lo-fi acoustic album, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere leans on a host of clichés and generalities that communicate nothing of what makes the man such a singular talent, and slots them into a plot and structure that generate no sense of tension or desire for resolution for its audience. I was gutted. I wanted, so painfully badly, for it to be good, and instead it was… this. Well. Never again. In the name of Never Again, we’ve decided, as a way of perhaps salvaging some useful slivers of previous metal from the dysfunctional wreckage of this film, to set out some lessons that other biopics of beloved musicians may wish to follow. Heed these lessons, oh music biopic directors. Heed them for the sake of all the disappointed fans out there. We can—we must—do better. 8) Moments of artistic inspiration are not necessarily cinematic These moments are probably the worst offenders, cliché-wise. I don’t know where they found an edition of Flannery O’Connor with her name printed so enormously on the front cover, but Bruce picking it up and thoughtfully studying the pages like they might contain directions to the Ark of the Covenant is, sadly, completely representative of every other moment in which the film shows us a thousand-watt lightbulb going off in Bruce’s head. There’s the one where he happens upon Terrence Malick’s Badlands while flicking channels and— what else—leans forward attentively from the sofa, inspiration throbbing from his eyes. The one where he writes “Why??” in his notebook after learning about the murder that would become the basis for Nebraska's title track. The one where he crosses out every instance of a third-person “he” and replaces it with an “I” in the same song’s scribbled lyrics, and the one where he scribbles “Double album??” in that same notebook, to show us that many of the songs that went on to form Nebraska and its tonally-antithetical follow-up Born in the USA were conjured in the same period. The camera lingers over these moments, highlighting them in neon pink and shouting them in your face. It’s very hard to make someone having an idea entertaining. Don’t do it. But if you must—don’t do it like this. 7) Something being true doesn’t make it interesting People do sometimes speak in clichés and generalities. So it may well be that Springsteen's manager Jon Landau explained the significance of Bruce’s new project to his wife with words as meaningless as “These songs are deeply personal” (you’d fucking hope so, Jon), or back to Bruce himself by saying “You tapped into something… incredibly powerful.” But when the critical analysis stops there, maybe it’s better to pretend Landau said something a little more insightful. Similarly, you’d really like to think that if a girlfriend of Springsteen’s did have a little play on a glockenspiel and then turn to him and say “I’d say I’m a natural” (as Odessa Young’s Faye does in the film), someone capable of writing the lyrics to “Thunder Road” might come up with a slightly more interesting response than “Yeah… definitely a natural.” Bruce’s close involvement in the making of the film means it’s reasonably likely that he did ratify these kinds of statements as being something that was said, but the bar for whether or not something should go in the film needs to be set a little higher than “Did this or something like it happen?” Somewhere closer to “Does this in any way advance the story or our understanding of any of the characters?” might be a start. 6) Spareness does not equal subtlety This is the one that’ll do it for a lot of viewers. Many great works of art are subtle, and require patience and attention to detail. If they’re good, they’ll reward that attention with lots of little details that mightn’t seem all that significant initially, but which, upon closer inspection, reveal something much bigger than their immediate appearance might suggest. (See: the books of Claire Keegan or Raymond Carver, the films of Kelly Reichardt or Wim Wenders, the poems of Elizabeth Bishop or Seamus Heaney, etc). This film shoots for that approach, but fatally omits the illustrative detail. After five or so days of driving him from New Jersey to Los Angeles, Springsteen’s buddy, about whom we know basically nothing other than that he's a mechanic and likes driving, I guess, is turning around to head home. “Hey,” he says to Springsteen, just before he leaves, “and Bruce…” And then…nothing. He just walks out and leaves! This might work if there was some contextual implication of what he might’ve wanted to say, but there isn’t. And, five minutes later, the film basically pulls the exact same trick. It’s full of these little absences—gaps in the picture it’s painting for us that we don’t have the information to fill. Saying less, if artfully done, is often a great cinematic decision – but you have to say something at some point. 5) Composite characters need some specifics if they’re going to avoid becoming person soup “Faye” in this film, played by Odessa Young, is a composite character representative of several girlfriends/situationships Bruce had around the time of writing Nebraska. That’s fine—but you need to put some clothes on the mannequin, otherwise it’s still just Human Number Three. Nothing Faye says, or anything anyone says to her, gives any indication of her having the sort of personality and quirks and foibles an actual human being might have developed over the course of their life. “I just wish you’d let me in,” she pleads to a distant Bruce in one of many moments that could’ve been lifted straight from The Bear or literally any other film/TV show featuring a tortured man and his romantic interest. She exists only in opposition to Springsteen's lonely creative journey—at worst, that’s probably quite sexist, at best it’s unrealistic and boring. 4) Reveal something, anything, new about the protagonist. Please! It doesn’t even have to be information. It could be something more abstract, like understanding. But it really does need to be in there. We get a whole several-minute flashback scene whose only apparent purpose is to reveal that the song “Mansion on the Hill,” which contains lyrics that very explicitly tell the listener about the speaker’s father taking him and his sister to play in a corn field by a mansion on a hill, is in fact based on Springsteen’s experience of his father taking him and his sister to play in a corn field by a mansion on a hill. In the most literal sense possible—tell us something we don’t know! There’s a point later in the film where a record producer played by Marc Maron has a conversation with someone pressing the vinyl for the album about how they might do it in a way that would allow them to convert some very low-quality cassette tape recordings into decent-quality LPs. And you think Hey! That’s kinda interesting! I’d like to know more about that! But probably only because there are so few other moments in the film that elicit that response, least of all about Springsteen himself. 3) Sad childhoods should look different to every other sad childhood we’ve ever seen on screen Black-and-white flashbacks to a kid sitting in his room listening to his out-of-shot parents arguing? Slow dancing with his kind and warm mother after his nasty, shouty, drunk father stumbled up to bed? Trying to stand up to said father on his mother’s behalf and being condescendingly praised for doing so? Pensively cycling down his street alone? It’s all there, and it might all very well be true to reality, but if you’re going to show some details from your protagonist’s childhood, why wouldn’t you pick some that he doesn’t have in common with every other movie protagonist who had a rough childhood? It’s just very hard to believe that a man who made his dime evoking the painfully specific detail of blue-collar life wouldn’t have had some more illustrative and unique details to offer than these. 2) Some tension, please! Structurally, this film is all over the place. The question at its centre seems to be something like “Will Bruce get to make this sad album that the record company don’t want him to make?” We already know he will—and that’s not necessarily a problem. A Complete Unknown showed us a pretty good time on its way to resolving the long-resolved question of whether or not Dylan would go electric. But it did that by loading the question with an understanding of its significance to the folk crowd who thought they’d found their new hero on one side, and Dylan and his artistic interests on the other. Down the coast in New Jersey, Springsteen faces nowhere near the same kinds of obstacles to his recording of Nebraska—the record company man will of course say something like “He’s gonna put out a folk album?! That’s insane!” (and, word-for-word, he does.) But they were never not going to release it, and his manager was on board from the get-go, so where’s the tension? The film then pivots toward the question of why Bruce wanted to make an album like this in the first place—the answer being his troubled childhood and mental state. But, as we’ve been through, these are evoked in such generic and unconvincing terms that it fails to pull the audience into an invested desire to see these questions answered. 1) Play the fucking hits They play little slivers of them. And we get a fair chunk of “Born in the USA,” which is great, and fair enough, the tunes on Nebraska aren’t quite as jukebox-y. But that would’ve made them perfect accompaniments to the mood the film’s trying to capture, and yet for some reason it seems afraid to fully unleash them. The best needle drop of the whole film isn’t even by Springsteen—it’s a Sam Cooke song, deployed in what is quite easily the film’s best scene, when Springsteen and Landau lie against a bed frame and let the song do the talking for them. A script like this one might’ve been saved by the proper deployment of some of Springsteen’s most wrought and real songwriting. Instead, it relies on itself. And it is not good. This story originally appeared in British GQ.
