Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere – LFF Film Review
I must admit I was not excited for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere because the music biopic genre has been overdone lately. But I tried to go in with an open mind and came away rather bored with this generic movie.
Based on Warren Zanes‘ book of the same name, Scott Cooper’s film focuses on the making of Bruce Springsteen‘s sombre acoustic album Nebraska in 1982. After achieving success with his previous album, The River, record label executives want Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) to capitalise on his rising popularity and produce more hits. But he shuns that idea and makes the unorthodox album on sub-par equipment in his New Jersey bedroom and also refuses to release singles, go on tour or do any press.
I respect Cooper for choosing a specific, niche story for his biopic instead of doing a jukebox musical or trying to cover all the big hits. However, by doing so, he creates a film that’s not very interesting for people who aren’t Springsteen fans. Perhaps diehard fans will dig this story, but I found the subject matter quite dull and relatively drama-free. Was this really the most exciting or interesting chapter of Springsteen’s life to tell?!
It’s also not particularly insightful or enlightening, so if you didn’t know much about Springsteen beforehand, you aren’t going to know much more coming out of this film. It seems to work on the assumption that everybody knows Springsteen and his discography well, but I only know his big hits. Because of the isolated nature of the film, there aren’t many concert scenes and opportunities to hear the hits (except the Born to Run opener) so you don’t get a true sense of how big The Boss is.
White doesn’t particularly look or sound like Springsteen except when he’s singing the Nebraska songs. He seems to struggle singing the big belters like Born to Run so it works out well that he doesn’t have to do much of that. Although he does a solid job, you never get the sense that Springsteen is a rock star because this is quiet, more introspective and concerned with his mental health. We get a lot of shots of White staring off into the distance and it becomes rather repetitive.
Elsewhere, Odessa Young shines as his love interest Faye and Paul Walter Hauser and David Krumholtz add value as a music engineer and record label executive. I liked Jeremy Strong as Springsteen’s longtime manager Jon Landau, but it felt like he was basically playing a combination of Kendall Roy and Roy Cohn, his characters in Succession and The Apprentice. Equally, Stephen Graham is good as Springsteen’s father Douglas but the black-and-white flashbacks he appears in are unnecessarily frequent.
I wasn’t a big fan of the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown and I somehow liked Deliver Me From Nowhere even less. It’s just too generic and dull to be engaging.
Seen at the London Film Festival. In cinemas from Friday 24th October