‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ Review: Turning Nebraska Into a State of Mind

The idea of approaching Bruce Springsteen’s biography in the same way he approached his songs on Nebraska seems, at first glance, like a smart and fitting decision on Scott Cooper’s part—but it is also one that runs into a number of inherent problems. In Springsteen’s career, Nebraska emerged as a reaction—almost a crisis response—to recent success, a need to retreat and escape. Everyone around him wanted a crowning statement, the kind of album that would come immediately afterward with Born in the U.S.A. Instead, his head was somewhere else: back in the town where he grew up, facing the ghosts of his past. What came out of that moment was an extraordinary album—one that had absolutely no interest in commercial imperatives or expectations.

That tension is clearly what Cooper is flirting with in Deliver Me From Nowhere: avoiding the usual biopic clichés—greatest-hits montages, oversized emotions, those “Eureka” moments where classic songs materialize out of thin air. To a degree, the film succeeds. But not entirely. The famous songs still appear as if by magic, and while the emotions are kept internal rather than performed outwardly, they burn inside Springsteen like a slow fire, leaving him perpetually on the verge of collapse. Steering clear of some biopic tropes does not prevent Cooper from falling into others, particularly the contemporary obsession with “the trauma plot,” where an entire creative universe is reduced to unresolved childhood wounds. At times, the film feels like it could have carried the subtitle: How I Discovered Therapy, Faced My Demons, Crawled Out of the Hole and Finally Made a Marketable Album.

The film opens with Bruce (Jeremy Allen White) at his peak: onstage, full of energy, riding the growing success of “Hungry Heart,” the breakout single from The River. After the tour ends and it’s time to record a new album, manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) finds him a house in Colts Neck, New Jersey—isolated, surrounded by woods, yet not far from Freehold, his hometown. That proximity means childhood memories, old stories, familiar bars, friends, fans. For Bruce, it is both fertile ground and a minefield: creatively productive, emotionally costly.

After catching Badlands on television, Bruce begins imagining songs about criminals, serial killers, and damaged souls—the figures who will populate Nebraska. But venturing into that psychological terrain inevitably pulls him back into his own past: an abusive, alcoholic father (Stephen Graham), a long-suffering mother (Gaby Hoffmann), and the few fleeting moments of happiness he remembers from the same places he revisits in 1981. Cooper depicts Springsteen’s childhood—he was born in 1949—through black-and-white flashbacks set in 1957, rendered in a way that feels closer to postwar Ireland than suburban New Jersey. The intention is clear, but the effect feels overstated, bordering on affectation.

The film’s dramatic core lies in the torturous process of recording those songs: Springsteen alone in his house with a single technician (Paul Walter Hauser), working on a four-track recorder and an echo machine that gives the music its ghostly, timeless quality. Neither the label nor Landau expects anything so defiantly anti-commercial, so much of the film’s narrative tension revolves around whether these recordings are even releasable—or whether they should be shelved altogether. At the same time, Bruce grapples with unresolved family issues (and some present-day developments involving his parents) and drifts into a tentative romance with Faye (Odessa Young), a kind, gentle single mother and the sister of a former schoolmate. She cares for him, but she cannot quite pull him out of his emotional paralysis.

This is where the film starts to struggle. White, coming off The Bear, has become something of a specialist in tortured, inward-looking characters, and there is no doubt he captures Springsteen’s internal collapse effectively. The problem is that this emotional distance spreads to the entire film. Strong, for all his talent, is also an actor whose characters tend to be tightly coiled and inward-facing, so even Landau fails to provide much of a counterbalance. When the naturally charismatic Odessa Young disappears from the screen, the film risks becoming relentlessly somber, weighed down by the sense that these two men—especially Bruce—are carrying the burden of the entire world on their shoulders.

Cooper, the director of Out of the Furnace, clearly identifies with the strain of American Gothic that seems to inhabit Springsteen’s mind—no coincidence, perhaps, given that Bruce is reading Flannery O’Connor as he writes and records. At its best, the film flows as a melancholic, almost mournful ballad about a famous rock singer returning home and reckoning with what that entails: friends, women, loneliness, contradictions, memories, fears. When Bruce begins recording “Nebraska,” the album’s title track, he links his own story to that of the serial killer Charles Starkweather. The thematic connection makes sense. But Cooper then adds a very literal visual detail—one you will immediately recognize—that turns the idea into something blunt and obvious.

And this pattern repeats itself. Deliver Me From Nowhere becomes an oddly ambivalent experience. A sharp, perceptive scene at the recording studio, where Bruce and Jon bring in the demos assuming they can be “improved” with the E Street Band, is immediately followed by a conversation between Landau and his wife that spells out the film’s meaning as if for beginners. The same thing happens again and again: with Faye, with Bruce’s parents, with his friend Matt. A moving, subtle, or melancholic scene is undercut by another that feels explanatory, emphasized, straight out of a handbook. And because it is difficult to fully connect with Bruce’s inner turmoil, that emotional distance only grows as the film goes on.

Deliver Me From Nowhere is not a bad film. More than anything, it is a sincere attempt to make a different kind of biopic—one that ultimately does not diverge quite as much from the formula as it believes it does. In its own way, the movie resembles what Nebraska might have sounded like if it had been fully recorded with the band in a professional studio: a collection of powerful, wounded songs slightly undermined by arrangements that smooth out what was meant to remain raw.