Copyright The Austin Chronicle
In contrast to Bruce Springsteen’s working-class wail, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is comparatively soft-spoken. It chronicles the period of time in the early Eighties when the ascendant rock star retreated to New Jersey to write Nebraska and grapple with a deepening depression, tonally adopting the same tempo and shadings of that now-legendary album – acoustic, stripped down, haunted. Working off of Warren Zanes nonfiction book, writer-director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Black Mass) sprinkles the breadcrumbs of inspiration that left their marks on Bruce (Jeremy Allen White) and the making of Nebraska – Flannery O’Connor, the synth-punk band Suicide, Terrence Malick’s Badlands and the real-life murder spree it was based on. But in the film’s presentation, the biggest influence, at least on Bruce’s fragile mental health, is his father, an alcoholic prone to violence and bullying. He’s played here by Stephen Graham (continuing his Adolescence hot streak) – menacing in black & white flashbacks and poignantly reduced in the film’s contemporary scenes, when a now-adult Bruce is trying to reach some peace with him. Distracting prosthetics are used to age the character up; one imagines Graham might have achieved the effect on his own – but no matter. It’s a wounded and wounding performance: the rosetta stone that explains Bruce’s hungry heart and a point of contrast to the other male figures who emerge in the film as the musician’s protectors and intimates. The most significant one is Jon Landau, Springsteen’s manager and record producer, played by Jeremy Strong with pin-drop stillness and real tenderness. In scenes with Bruce, he manages his client without handling his client – we see him caretaking, knowing when not to push, weighing what to take off his plate. His dedication is absolute, as witnessed in the film’s best scene, a back-and-forth between Landau and a clueless record exec (David Krumholtz), and in its most negligible, two domestic interludes where Grace Gummer’s stuck playing “listening face” to her husband’s out loud worrying over Bruce. Everybody’s worried about Bruce, including the sweet single mom from his hometown he’s courting. Feather-haired and softly featured, Odessa Young (Mothering Sunday, The Damned) smuggles a lot of nuance into a composite part that exists to illustrate how broken Bruce is, how unworthy of love he feels. (Gaby Hoffmann, as Bruce’s mom, completes the film’s trifecta of women defined entirely by their relationship to men.) To be fair, Springsteen was always going to be the main attraction – it’s right there in the title. After three seasons of kitchen nightmare The Bear, White’s got plenty of practice playing someone with deep depression, but his Bruce is a distinct creation – there’s no shouting, only terrible sadness. Facially, there’s little resemblance, and they’ve blotted out his natural baby blues with contacts that turn his eyes into fathomless pools of black, which hamper an actor’s mobility as much as bulky prosthetics. But bodily, White recalls Springsteen in uncanny ways – a more than plausible singing voice and stage presence, a particular hunch. For a film that gets right up close to a musical genius, it’s when he’s walking away, hands jammed in his leather jacket, that you can see the resemblance most clearly. This article appears in October 24 • 2025.
