Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (dir. Scott Cooper)
Certificate: 12A
Running Time: 119 mins
UK Distributor: 20th Century Studios
UK Release Date: 24 October 2025
WHO’S IN SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE?
Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham, Odessa Young, Gaby Hoffmann, Marc Maron, David Krumholtz, Johnny Cannizzaro, Harrison Gilbertson, Chris Jaymes, Grace Gummer
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Scott Cooper (director, writer, producer), Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Eric Robinson and Scott Stuber (producers), Jeremiah Fraites (composer), Masanobu Takayanagi (cinematographer), Pamela Martin (editor)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
In 1982, Bruce Springsteen (White) records a deeply personal new album…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE?
Just like Bob Dylan, Freddie Mercury, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash and even the N.W.A. before him, Bruce Springsteen has been gifted with a fairly straightforward biopic about his life and career. Although, to filmmaker Scott Cooper’s credit, he is at least trying to make Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere actually about something, rather than just a basic summary of the artist’s greatest life hits which a lot of other movies in this category have ended up being.
That’s not to say it immediately puts the film ahead of the pack, because while Cooper’s intentions are no doubt sincere when it comes to looking into a mentally testing episode in the life and career of arguably one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, very little about it truly stands out enough to feel as though it’s subverting many of the familiar tropes.
Cooper’s film focuses specifically on a period in the early 80s wherein Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White), having already gained significant attention and adoration but isn’t yet at the level of international stardom he is today, is contemplating what to do for his next album. His eventual decision baffles everyone from music executives to even his own manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong): an acoustic, stripped-down and decisively sombre series of tracks recorded in his New Jersey bedroom on a studio-unfriendly cassette tape recorder. As we slowly discover, the unconventional album – soon to be known as Nebraska – holds a significant importance to Springsteen, as it explores his deep feelings of depression and insecurity that stems from his unhappy childhood with his stern and abusive alcoholic father Douglas (Stephen Graham), which Bruce wrestles with in the film’s present as he navigates his newfound fame as well as a budding relationship with single mother Faye (Odessa Young).
Those who perhaps know every single corner of Springsteen’s Nebraska, or may even have read Warren Zanes’ non-fiction book of the same name on which this movie is based, will already understand the emotional context behind the album that Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is attempting to depict. Cooper, no stranger to dour and sometimes overwhelmingly bleak material such as Out of the Furnace and Black Mass, applies a similar mentality to his take on a period in the artist’s life that aligns decently with his well-documented bouts with mental health, and admirably doesn’t shy away too much from showing some of the more harrowing consequences of being in a psychologically unbalanced mindset. Springsteen, as portrayed in a soulfully understated performance by White, forms such a precious attachment to his unique tape recordings that he drives sound engineers crazy by demanding they replicate the exact homemade aesthetic on a more traditional vinyl record, and you can feel his frustration as his perfectionist tendencies in this situation cause headaches left and right, as well as his somewhat unhealthy reliance on them as some form of art therapy.
It’s clear that Cooper is eager to explore topics of mental health and complex family dynamics more than delivering a more conventional biopic, but the problem with Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is that much of it is fairly surface level. There aren’t many points where we get to truly know that much about Springsteen or his achievements, almost as though it’s counting on the viewer to already be aware of everything there is about him before they watch it, so to the untrained eye moments that would be otherwise be easily picked up on by longtime fans can come off as empty and insignificant. The most we see of Springsteen struggling with his internal demons are various scenes of him brooding outside with his hands deep in his jacket pockets, and even then do we rarely get an idea of how far down his issues are, since Cooper’s script keeps much of the drama closed-off in favour of naturalistic scenes that amplify the grittiness yet mute the emotional complexity.
Ironically, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere works a little better when it is playing more into the conventional traits of a music biopic. While the focus is primarily on the formation of Nebraska, it also depicts other major events like Springsteen creating and eventually recording a track by the name of “Born in the U.S.A.” which even non-Springsteen die-hards will recognise as a milestone song. In these brief scenes which tap into more familiar tropes and narrative structures, you can feel the film becoming more alive as the performances, the cinematography and of course the soundtrack carry a rousing energy that’s nowhere near as present in the rest of the movie. Instead, it offers a thin depiction of the real mental struggles that Springsteen went through, alongside a fictional romance that slows the already faintly-paced movie down much more.
It’s a shame that there’s ultimately not that much to take away from Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, for whether or not you consider yourself a fan of the musician or his wide discography, there are aspects of his life that can certainly be translated into an emotionally deep character study about a number of difficult subjects like mental health, the kind that Cooper is clearly trying to make here. But with its surface-level musings and light characterisation, the film becomes as interesting as walking through the vast, empty cornfields in actual Nebraska.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is a mediocre biopic that attempts to explore the deeper emotions of its central figure, as played by a soulfully understated Jeremy Allen White, but it ends up going no further than the surface in a film that plays better to longtime Springsteen fans than general audiences who might not know that much about the man or his music.
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