Despite usually boasting outstanding performances in leading and supporting roles, the modern musician biopic has been in a sorry state for quite some time, so while Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere bends to a lot of tiresome genre conventions (and still has great performances), it also makes a lot of good choices to add a certain degree of thoughtfulness. Like many of the better biopics out there, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere doesn’t try to encompass an artist’s entire, complex life, but rather focuses on a rich, tumultuous, and specifically interesting portion of their life. Such an approach always leads to a less obvious and cloying film, and that decision gives Cooper the best film of his career since his debut feature, Crazy Heart.
It’s the early 1980s, and after several years of rising stardom, singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) has started to get his first major taste of fame. He’s just wrapped up a lengthy tour promoting The River, his first number one album, and the record label is hoping that Bruce can get back into the studio and out on the road again to capitalize on all of his momentum. But after several years with almost no breaks, Bruce is visibly exhausted and burnt out. He’s willing to work on some new music at a rental home in Colt’s Neck, New Jersey, hoping to lay down some rough demos of songs before going into a New York City studio with the rest of his band. With the help of a sound engineer (Paul Walter Hauser) who warns Bruce that recording onto cassette in a bedroom won’t sound great, Springsteen lays down some low-fi, stripped down, and surprisingly dark material. There isn’t anything close to a single in sight, but Bruce ends up liking these songs just the way they are, imperfections and all. His supportive producer and manager, Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), has to not only defend Bruce’s vision, but also make sure that his client’s obvious mental health struggles don’t lead to darker places.
What emerged from these sessions and behind-the-scenes business and personal struggles was Nebraska, Springsteen’s most challenging and creatively complex album. Based on Warren Zanes’ book of the same name, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere hones in on an emotionally rich time in its subject’s life. Nebraska came between Springsteen’s first time topping the charts and 1984’s Born in the U.S.A., which would become his best selling album and one of the biggest selling records of all time. Springsteen, as shown in Cooper’s film, actually came up with some of the biggest tracks off of Born in the U.S.A. (the titular track originally intended for a Paul Schrader film that never happened, “Dancing in the Dark,” “Glory Days,” “I’m On Fire”) while working on what would eventually become Nebraska, but he was so deep in his own mind and wrestling with a lot of past and present traumas that the surefire hits were all shelved in favour of an albums for which he refused to do a tour or any press. He even refused to tour in support of Nebraska, and declined to be photographed for the album cover. These songs were meant to stand on their own merits, without comment or embellishment.
By choosing this specific point in Springsteen’s life, writer-director Cooper can’t be accused of “playing the hits” like so many other musical biopics. While better known singles are heard throughout Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, Cooper stays focused on his subject’s headspace at this one particular time, and it’s a period in which there’s plenty of great music, but also a lot of anxiety, loneliness, and strife. With more scrutiny and pressure placed upon him, Springsteen finds himself at a crossroads in his career: become a big city dwelling megastar and give the label what they want or stay rooted in the New Jersey stomping grounds that inspired him. His fraught relationship with his abusive, hard drinking father (Stephen Graham) is also at the front of his mind, at one point dropping everything he has going on after his mother (Gaby Hoffman) calls to say dad’s been arrested in Los Angeles and has gone AWOL. Bruce begins a relationship with a kind single mom and waitress named Faye (Odessa Young), but as much as their time together brings him happiness, his mind is usually elsewhere.
Like many musical biopics, there are some corny moments (watching Bruce scribble “why?” in a notebook) and hyper-specific, on-the-nose, expository dialogue, but for the most part, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere retains a great deal of humanity and restraint. Although the film isn’t particularly long for this sort of thing, Cooper’s pace is unhurried, and visually the film finds a nice middle ground between creating early 80s nostalgia and not drawing too much attention to itself. Like the artist it represents, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere tries to stay as grounded in everyday life as possible, only getting into the nitty gritty of fame and record label politics when absolutely necessary.
As a stressed out and eternally searching depiction of Springsteen, White displays a keen amount of observant balance. White’s take on Springsteen is one of a person driven to overthinking everything except his music. When it comes to shaping Nebraska into what it would become, Springsteen is resolute. But when it comes to balancing his career and personal life, White shows just how much of a mess the artist was in this period, be it laying down on the floor in a borderline panic attack listening to dark punk rock or withdrawing from everyone around him entirely. White’s empathetic portrayal of Springsteen nicely illustrates how some of the best art comes from darkness, while never glorifying those struggles for the sake of easily digestible drama. White gets great scene partners in the forms of Hauser and Young, both of whom want the best for Bruce, but are never quite sure how to support him. And Strong gives one of his best performances as Landau, the rare example of a talent manager who seems to be a stand-up person who just wants to take care of his client and friend.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is the best case scenario for one of these movies. It’s accessible for those familiar with Bruce Springsteen and just as entertaining for viewers who might not know a thing about him. The fact that it makes this film so accessible without resorting to more obvious forms of melodrama or pandering is a testament to what the cast and Cooper are able to achieve here. Just like White’s performance, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere plays the person, not the legend, with the film acting as a perfect reflection of the album that provides Cooper’s narrative backbone. It’s elegant, folksy, raw, and unafraid of darkness or complex human emotion.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere opens in theatres everywhere on Friday, October 24, 2025.
