“Deliver Me from Nowhere” — that’s what we’re calling it — is a semi-desolate sketch of a biopic about a depressed 32-year-old man who channel surfs across a much better movie on TV one night in the fall of 1981. The man is Bruce Springsteen (a possessed Jeremy Allen White), the movie is Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” and its story of a Korean War vet who takes his 15-year-old girlfriend on a killing spree across the American heartland gives the wayward rock god a newfound sense of direction that just might save his life.
Adapted from Warren Zanes’ book of the same name, and directed by Scott Cooper (“Out of the Furnace”) with all of his usual self-seriousness, the chilly but tender “Deliver Me from Nowhere” begins with Bruce returning to Freehold after a triumphant year on tour with the E Street Band. He’s on the cusp of the megastardom he would claim soon thereafter, but even closer to the brink of a nervous breakdown.
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The reality of his imminent success has left Bruce feeling like a stranger in the only home he’s ever known, while the open highway that stretches west into the future — an axiomatic symbol of freedom in earlier songs like “Thunder Road” and “Born to Run” — has suddenly come to seem like the surest path towards self-annihilation. Haunted by unresolved childhood trauma and suffering from a depression that he knows how to sing about but lacks the words to diagnose, Bruce is (vaguely) tormented by the vertigo of feeling more lost than ever at the same time as he’s fulfilling his destiny.
In the ballad of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate (whose names were changed for the purposes of Malick’s film), Bruce sees his own disconnection staring back at him so clearly that his TV set might as well be a mirror. That recognition is the engine Bruce needs to jumpstart a new burst of creative self-discovery. It compels him to write an album that confronts the empty promise of deliverance head-on, and in doing so create a vehicle powerful enough to leave his demons in the rearview.
At its core, “Deliver Me from Nowhere” is a small and brittle film about how difficult it is to move forward when something is holding you back. It’s a film about a guy who’s strapped to a rocket that’s about to ignite, only to find that an anchor the size of New Jersey has been wrapped around his ankles; a guy who’s gonna rip in half right down the middle if he doesn’t find a way to shake off that weight before he ignites. That description might imply a certain urgency, but Cooper’s taciturn script is largely content to move with the speed and ambivalence of self-discovery. “I know who you are,” someone tells Bruce in the parking lot after his regular show at The Stone Pony. “That makes one of us,” he replies.
Just as “A Complete Unknown” told the story of Dylan going electric, the richer but less inviting “Deliver Me from Nowhere” could be said to tell the story of Springsteen going folk. And yet — for all of the tedious biopic tropes that Cooper finds a way to force into his otherwise withdrawn character study — that comparison would mischaracterize a movie whose subject hardly goes anywhere at all.
Straining to bridge the inestimable gap between “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Gus Van Sant’s “Last Days,” Cooper’s film is at its best during the frequent stretches when it finds Bruce staring at the walls of his isolated rental home in Colts Neck. Reading Flannery O’Connor. Listening to Suicide. Maybe even thinking about committing it. It’s hard to say how deep Bruce’s anguish goes, because — to Cooper’s credit — this movie doesn’t tell us in any explicit terms. On the contrary, it rightly trusts that White’s performance will convey Bruce’s inner turmoil without putting too fine a point on it or making it more legible than it really was to any of the people who knew him (or to himself, for that matter).
Head cocked and shoulders hunched like an invisible snake is wrapped around his windpipe, White is less interested in mimicry than evocation, and he manages to creates such an ineffably convincing Springsteen because he allows himself to seem like a fraud. While the Boss’ persona has long relied on his ability to represent freedom and burden all at once, “Deliver Me from Nowhere” introduces us to Bruce at a moment before he’s learned how to reconcile the two, and so White plays him with the honesty of a man who always feels like he’s been caught in a lie.
He doesn’t look a ton like Springsteen (though popped collars and black leather jackets help sell the illusion), and his ability to sing just like him is sorely underused in a movie that defaults to the actual recordings whenever it can, but his performance is steeped in a truth so natural and unforced that by the end of the film you almost forget that he’s playing someone else. In White’s hands — and with a key assist from the eminently believable Odessa Young, who plays a Debbie Harry-styled composite of all the girlfriends who Bruce couldn’t give himself to at the time — the film’s searching lack of focus becomes more of a feature than a bug.
If only the rest of Cooper’s biopic were so confident in letting Bruce’s emotions speak for themselves; if only it shared Bruce’s conviction that the spare recordings he and guitar tech Mike Batlan (a warm and fuzzy Paul Walter Hauser) committed to a four-track TEAC 144 in a Colts Neck rental house should exist separately from the arena-sized anthems he was laying down with The E Street Band in the studio. The not-so-great irony of “Deliver Me from Nowhere” is that the movie teeters closest to “Walk Hard”-like tripe whenever it focuses on the Herculean effort required to preserve the rawness of those recordings as they were transferred to tape, as well the concurrent effort to convince the suits at Columbia that “Nebraska” wouldn’t be a career-killer.
The problem is neatly embodied by the outsized role of Bruce’s lifelong manager-producer, played here by a clenched but schmoozy Jeremy Strong in a performance that makes Jon Landau sound like Roy Cohn’s more benevolent younger brother. It’s not that Strong is miscast, it’s that he exists in a different movie altogether — one that has nothing to do with the pain of Bruce’s songwriting and everything to do with the crazy story of trying to sell it.
Cooper mercifully cut the groan-worthy trailer bit where Landau tells another record exec about how Springsteen has to repair himself with “Nebraska” so that he can “repair the entire world” after that, but scene after scene remains in which Landau is forced to smooth over the fact that his star client is going acoustic and singing about serial killers. No singles!? No interviews!? No tour!?!?. First he has to convince David Krumholtz, then he has to get chewed out on the phone by the real Jimmy Iovine, then he has to go home to his wife and kids with a dazed look on his face.
There’s no denying that Landau was essential to the release of Springsteen’s most radical album, but “Deliver Me from Nowhere” never justifies why he should be the only character to exist independently from Bruce’s point-of-view. Is watching one of the most legendary musicians in modern history churn his deepest pain into masterpieces like “Atlantic City” really so unremarkable that Cooper needed to forfeit roughly 30% of this movie to a glorified hypeman whose only job is to sell us on how historic it was?
Well, yes and no. The other regard in which “Deliver Me from Nowhere” strikes an unhelpful compromise between hardscrabble portrait and hacktastic biopic has to do with how it dramatizes the source of Bruce’s aforementioned pain: Ultra-broad, black-and-white flashbacks in which a young Springsteen becomes an outlet for all of the anger and resentment that drove his dad to drink.
Stephen Graham is a wonderful actor, and I have no doubt that he’s an excellent parent as well, but you just know it’s bad news when he shows up as someone’s father in a biopic. Indeed, the mere fact of his casting is so evocative that it negates the need for many of his actual scenes, the majority of which are reductive and indistinct visions of domestic abuse. Only the last of them, which takes place in the film’s present day, manages to reveal anything that we couldn’t glean from the shots of an adult Bruce staring at the home where he grew up.
Rather than embrace the raw humanity of Bruce’s characterization and celebrate its refusal to adhere to some prefab emotional arc, “Deliver Me from Nowhere” seems convinced that it has to atone for its sparseness with an equal amount of auto-tuned noise — that it has to compensate for the fact that it ends with Bruce in therapy instead of on top of the world. Cooper’s film wants to be the “Nebraska” of rock biopics, but it lacks the finesse to retain the essence of that sound when transferring it into the body of a commercial biopic. In that sense at least, it all too perfectly articulates how difficult it can be too move forward when something is holding you back.
Grade: B-
“Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” premiered at the 2025 Telluride Film Festival. Searchlight Pictures will release it in theaters on Friday, October 24.
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