Born in the U.S.A…. Specifically, Nebraska.
DIRECTED BY SCOTT COOPER/2025
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere adapts Warren Zanes’ book about when the artist accidentally created his dark, austere, and most personal album Nebraska. Zanes looks at the process of creating it, it’s influence, how it influenced others, Springsteen at the point of his career between rock star and rock legend and how the album’s relationship to the one that followed, Born in The U.S.A., affected that and how it worked with his personal depression. That’s a lot of things and few of them are cinematic.
The film makes the smart decision to center the film on Springsteen’s relationship with his longtime manager Jon Landau (played by Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong respectfully). When we first see them together, it’s backstage at the end of the tour for The River, the album that gave Springsteen his first hit single. Landau makes several suggestions to give him anything he needs between what’s on the agenda. Bruce waves him off. Soon after we see them about to walk into the studio. Landau recalls the early days they spent there with the E Street Band before their breakout and says it feels the same. Bruce agrees. Where most would be satisfied, the artist and the one who helped get him to a superstar pinnacle realize there’s more to do and further to go.
Springsteen rents a home in the rural suburb of Colts Neck, New Jersey. Due to money wasted in the studio for The River, he invests in a TASCAM Portastudio 144 4-tack cassette recorder, used for home recording (not studio), to lay down demos in the bedroom of his digs with the help of only his acoustic guitar, harmonica, and his roadie Mile Batlan (played at perfect pitch by Paul Walter Hauser) on the TASCAM even though he’d never been behind a board before. Inspired by the movies Badlands and The Night of The Hunter, the writing of Flannery O’Connor, and the more painful memories from childhood conjured up from his depression, the tracks often prove to be unvarnished story songs instead of rockers. When he gets into the studio with the band, he can’t get the feeling of the demos. His decision to take a stand and use those original recordings creates two problems for Springsteen and Landau, releasing a very uncommercial work after right they’ve established a strong radio foothold the studio expects them to build on and transferring that cassette to a pressed recording. The last part is mainly played in a few scenes with expressions on Marc Maron’s face as engineer Chuck Plotkin.
Even more challenging to Jon Landau is watching his friend in a desperate, possibly suicidal, emotional state and not knowing how to help. Springsteen is struggling with the guilt many artists like him have to contend with, when your work gives the underclass a voice when you are no longer a part of, there is an aspect of exploitation. He questions if he can connect with the people he writes about.
The two main performances carry the movie. Jeremy Allen White captures Springsteen at this moment of his life both as the public persona we know and the troubled private one. He carries the awkward charisma we’ve seen in interviews and conveys the struggles to connect with those outside his music life, even those he grew up with. The only time we see him completely comfortable in his skin is behind a guitar in concert, in studio, playing with the bar band at The Stone Pony, or in the bedroom in in Colts Neck. White expresses the constant engagement-retreat he has with both the people he meets and knows.
Jeremy Strong does most of the heavy lifting and is the standout even though he has the less showy part. In the book, Zane states that part of Landau’s gift was knowing when to be a manager and when to be a friend. Strong creates a lowkey warmth that gets overshadowed when he has to discuss business. He beautifully expresses the struggle to reach out to a friend he can’t completely understand even though he may be the one who understands him the most. As someone who deals with brilliant artists I could relate to his struggle to work with and relate to someone who pushes himself out on the edge. Landau tells Bruce that his job is to keep the noise out so Springsteen can find the truth. That truth, or his way of dealing with it, may be killing his friend.
Unfortunately, Scott Cooper’s script doesn’t do justice to this story. It is gets muddled when it strays from that relationship and the making of Nebraska. Cooper pushes it aside more than he should for overlong flashbacks of a youngster Bruce and his bad dad (Stephen Graham) and a relationship with what is becoming the music biopic trope, the composite girlfriend with actress Odessa Young doing her best with very little. The only songs we really follow Springsteen’s work with are the title track and “Mansion on a Hill”. We don’t get how he had to deal with The E-Street Band in telling them he was releasing a solo record. Both the obstacle of clearing the release with the studio and figuring out the pressing are basically dealt with in one scene for each. It feels like they started out to make a film for a limited audience of Nebraska-heads and then tried to expand it for a Bohemian Rhapsody audience, delivering to neither completely.
His direction saves it from going off the rails. A former actor, Cooper knows how to hone in on the performances. We completely buy Springsteen and Landau’s relationship. While Landau has trouble helping Springsteen, we realize the importance and stability he gives the musician to both express himself and survive. He gets the energy of the performances. The scene where Springsteen and The E Street Band capture “Born In The U.S.A.” is exhilarating as hell.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere will vary in enjoyment to who sees it due to the strength’s and weaknesses. The lack of narrative thread or even forward propulsion of last year’s A Complete Unknown will understandably turn many off. However, if you’re interested in a character study involving the messiness of friendship in a creative endeavor, then put your make up on and your hair up pretty. If you didn’t get that last reference, stay home and watch Ray again.