There are two Bruce Springsteens in Scott Cooper’s volatile new biopic, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. At times, we might wonder if one has ever met the other. The first is a silent, troubled, closed-off young artist almost too eager to fence himself in. This Springsteen rents a home in the woods of Colts Neck, New Jersey, and effectively barricades himself into a bedroom where he obsessively watches Terrence Malick’s Badlands on a loop and feverishly writes the anguished songs that would form his seminal 1982 folk album, Nebraska. For all its bleakness, the music itself, a dark heartland murmur, still has a fearsome sense of possibility: Springsteen composes lyrics about highways and loners, all-night drives and lovers on the run. It’s ironic, perhaps, that he must enclose himself in a tiny room to let himself dream of expanses both physical and existential.
The other Springsteen, glimpsed less frequently in the film, is an almost shamanic performer, shaking and sweating and bellowing his way through sets even on the relatively small stage of the Stone Pony, the legendary Asbury Park club where he often plays. Cooper makes sure to push both these images of Springsteen to their extremes. He plays up the loneliness on one end and the explosiveness on the other, and what’s most compelling about Deliver Me From Nowhere is the constant tension between these two sides of the singer’s persona. Somewhere in the whipsawing nature of this character is a truth about artistic creation, but also about depression. Springsteen never says it — we suspect that, despite his downright paranormal eloquence as a songwriter, he lacks the words to express it — but this is a man who needs help.
Jeremy Allen White, who always seems to do inchoate torment so well, makes a fine Springsteen. He definitely looks the part (despite the fact that he’s got a tiny mouth and the real Bruce Springsteen looks like he could eat you whole), and his clipped, tense demeanor hints compellingly at the storms roiling beneath. This is important: Deliver Me From Nowhere can be a bit relentless in its constant and rather screenwritery references to Springsteen’s angst, but White sells it all so well that we go along with even the most ham-handed dialogue. (“I do know who you are,” someone says to Bruce. “That makes one of us,” he replies.) Cooper and White get the more expressive, energetic side of the Boss as well: Every scene of Bruce performing in this film feels like a necessary release.
Deliver Me From Nowhere focuses on the relatively short period in which Springsteen wrote the songs for Nebraska as well as some of the key pieces that would form the runaway success Born in the U.S.A. It’s a neat dichotomy, all the more remarkable for being true: Everyone can tell the songs from Born in the U.S.A. (in particular the title track) will be huge hits that will vault him into the stratosphere, but before he can do that he needs to get the gritty, grimy, homemade Nebraska out of his system — and he needs to make sure it sounds like the album was recorded in someone’s bedroom. It’s almost like an exorcism, one the film connects through black-and-white flashbacks to the singer’s childhood with an abusive, alcoholic father (Stephen Graham). This backstory at first feels like it’ll be the usual business about a difficult past and getting away from it and all that. (Abusive parents and musical biopics, after all, often go hand in hand.) But Cooper works an angle that, while not exactly fresh, is certainly moving. He slowly shows us Bruce’s realization that his father was haunted by the same demons that now trouble him. A key childhood memory of going to see Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter with his father focuses on young Bruce’s terror at the sight of Robert Mitchum’s mad killer preacher terrorizing two children in the 1954 film. The initial implication is that Bruce identifies with the kids and that his dad is the Mitchum-like demon. Later, watching the movie again (and imagining his dad back in the audience), Bruce realizes that his father also related to the kids and that Mitchum’s black-clad villain is really an elemental darkness that will forever chase them both.
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Structurally and narratively, the film can be a little pat. We can tell in advance every beat of Bruce’s romance with a young single mom, Faye Romano (Odessa Young), who initially seems too cool to want anything from him but who soon grows frustrated with his … is it aloofness? Unavailability? Weirdly, most of what we see of their relationship is warm and tender, so his emotional problems and their effects on her wind up feeling like narrative obligations rather than anything organic. In the singer’s more professional realm, Jeremy Strong, who’s never afraid to go big, gives Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, a kind of operatic calmness: He speaks softly, but somehow all his words sound like breathing exercises, coming straight from the diaphragm. In truth, this makes the character a lot more interesting than the script does. Landau sticks by his guy even when he’s not sure he’s doing the right thing, and Strong’s performance hints at how difficult this must actually be for someone who is, ultimately, a businessman.
Everybody who makes a musical biopic these days (or really any kind of biopic) seems determined to try and do it in as un-biopic-y a fashion as possible — which in turn makes the films seem even more like biopics. Pushing against the genre’s supposed tropes, Deliver Me From Nowhere limits itself to a brief period and focuses largely on the creation of one rather odd album. But it still can’t help delving into the childhood flashbacks, the busted romantic relationship — the whole smorgasbord of conventions. At its best, the film gives us a sincere look at the creative process and reveals it to be a sad, scary, at times uncontrollable and destructive thing. Just for that alone, it’s worth seeing.
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