Bruce Springsteen was 32 when he wrote Nebraska, his gorgeous folk album of working stiffs struggling through hard times and bad choices. He followed it up with Born in the USA, one of the best-selling albums in history, just two years later. It has twelve songs; seven of them became number one hits.
Before that, he was already a celebrated artist thanks to his incredible run of albums with Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and The River. For anyone else, that would be enough for an entire career. For Bruce, it was barely the opening act.
In 1988, just six years after Nebraska, Bruce and the E Street Band traveled to East Germany where they performed for over 300,000 people. According to journalist Erik Kirschbaum, the direct influence of that concert helped contribute to the fall of the Berlin Wall the next year.
Today, Bruce still tours with the E Street Band. He has written books, directed films, and made even more classic records. To say that he's been a force of change in the cultural landscape of the entire western hemisphere wouldn't be an overstatement.
There is no way a single film could ever encompass even a fraction of that kind of a career. Nor could it contain the multitudes of contradictions, failures, comebacks, and personal victories that every human life includes in the process.
To writer and director Scott Cooper's credit, Deliver Me From Nowhere doesn't even try to do so. It is one of the only smart decisions this good intentioned but woefully misguided film makes.
Cooper instead chooses to focus on the writing and production of Nebraska, yet fabricates or obfuscates so much of the process I can't help but wonder why not make up a fictional artist instead.
In Cooper's version of events, Nebraska is the product of Bruce's first great battle with depression. A tipping point where his past traumas and unresolved issues with his father finally catch up with him. He pours himself on the page and into the broken, echoingly imperfect sound he and technician Mike Batlan built during a three week process in the winter of 1981.
But writing music and finding a sound isn't sexy to a mainstream audience. It isn't salacious or melodramatic. Cooper knows this, which is why Deliver Me From Nowhere takes every opportunity to sensationalize the process and Bruce himself.
In reality, Bruce dug deep into American history, socialism, the works of Woody Guthrie, and the writings of Flannery O'Connor. He read the Grapes of Wrath and fell hard for its film adaptation by John Ford. It was a process where he discovered the deeply held political beliefs that would color his work for the rest of his career.
In Deliver Me From Nowhere, Cooper depicts a broken man who still lives in the black and white memory of his childhood, unable to escape the shadow of a violently unstable and alcoholic father. To cope, Springsteen falls for a fan, Faye Romano (Odessa Young), and steps in as a surrogate father to her young daughter.
Except Faye is a fictional character and, like all the women in Cooper's reductive retelling, she's there only to tell the audience how hard Bruce's life is right now.
When Bruce coldly abandons them halfway through the film, it's not depicted as a failure or the repetition of generational trauma. It's just Bruce going through a phase. It is an invention of selfish cruelty designed to make Bruce's steps towards healing seem more triumphant. Instead, it anchors the entire film with an ugly and pointless detour it never recovers from.
Elsewhere, fictional Bruce plods through every cliche of every musical biopic you can imagine. After the extraordinary Walk Hard, which skewered this genre so thoroughly almost twenty years ago, you'd think other directors would know better than to repeat the same mistakes.
Bruce goes to buy a new car (Nebraska's "Used Cars") and the dealer tells him, "I know who you are". Bruce smiles and looks into the distance: "At least one of us does," he responds.
Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), one of Bruce's most devout and staunch allies, has nothing to do here but remind the audience that this is an important record. Most of his scenes are in a dimly lit apartment, where Landau talks at his wife about how this album says everything about Bruce. It is blunt and superficial dialog that treats both the audience and the subject like children.
In a memory, Bruce plays with his sister on a field overlooking a mansion on a hill. No points for guessing which song he writes in one of the numerous montages that follows.
Is Deliver Me From Nowhere a competently put together production? Yes, it is. The cinematography by Masanobu Takayanagi is beautiful and most of the cast does an admirable job with the lazy material. Even Strong, who has so little to do, catches a spark of inspiration. Watch how he reacts to hearing Nebraska the first time, and then again when it comes together in the end. It is a subtle and beautiful performance of a man trying to understand his friend through art.
In a way, it's precisely that moment which shows how badly misjudged the rest of Cooper's film is. Bruce's music is so universal at this point that it means different things to everyone who hears it. We've all attached a piece of ourselves to these melodies, and they invoke a sense of time and place, both real and imagined. By trying to explain Bruce in such reductive terms only harms that connection. Especially when it hinges on made up events.
For a far better film about The Boss and his connection with the world, I recommend checking out Gurinder Chadha's beautiful Blinded by the Light. It is everything that Deliver Me From Nowhere isn't.
