RATING
Director(s): Scott Cooper
Country: United States
Author: Scott Cooper, Warren Zanes
Actor(s): Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser
Written by Tom Augustine
Critical distance is a difficult thing to maintain when the subject matter is vital to the person you are in the moment of watching. The following is an honest attempt to wrestle with that. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere has been a big red mark on my upcoming film calendar essentially since it was announced; ‘are you excited for that Springsteen film?’ I’ve been asked countless times, to which I’ve had to respond with a dejected ‘no’. I figure I’m one of the more ardent Boss fanboys in the country — I have grappled with frustration when encountering those who think Springsteen’s discography begins and ends with ‘Born in the USA’, arguably one of his weakest megahits (that still happens to be an all-time great rock song). I found Springsteen in my university years, when I was as lost a soul as any late teen is, and my enjoyment of his work, beginning with ‘Jungleland’, quickly morphed into a full-on obsession. Here was the rock superstar for me — a man of the people, a showman, a man from a rough-and-tumble working class background that managed to hold onto the vulnerability and sensitivity that is vital to his genius. Springsteen’s younger years were separated from mine both temporally and geographically, and yet the stories he told and the people he inhabited felt like people I knew and grew up with. There’s a sense of possessiveness that comes with loving an artist’s work so deeply — it’s not that far removed from those who have loved a book and thusly hated a film adaptation, a response that I’ve expressed annoyance over before — yet here I am, feeling similarly resentful over a subject of which I’m possessive. The movies always retain their capacity to humble you.
This year has been an exceptionally good one for Springsteen fans — the seven-disc Tracks II builds on the original treasure trove of Tracks, unveiling entire albums created by the New Jersey rockstar and never released. The big ticket item here is The Streets of Philadelphia Sessions, an album of moody, searching tracks in the vein of the Boss’ Oscar-winning song of the same name. Not to be outdone, a casual exploration of his vault revealed a lost album heretofore thought to be the stuff of myth: Electric Nebraska, the studio version of the classic album Nebraska, one of the most singular offerings in Springsteen’s long and illustrious career, entirely recorded in his bedroom. As Electric Nebraska is finally, impossibly revealed to us this week (renamed Nebraska ‘82: Expanded Edition), along comes Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Scott Cooper’s long-gestating exploration of the making of that very album, delving into those hallowed years of introspection and artistic freedom that led to one of the greatest of all albums. Why this particular period of Boss history? Cooper seems particularly interested in telling a story of depression — something that Springsteen has struggled with his entire life — but the making of this atmospheric, strange and haunted album seems to suggest an approach that would thrive best outside the realm of the middlebrow biopic that has infected the multiplex in the modern era. Cooper, a journeyman generally less accomplished than the contemporary journeyman ultimo hombre James Mangold, whose own forays into this subgenre have been similarly lacklustre, is ultimately too workmanlike a filmmaker to match the outsider singularity of the work at its centre. Like most of these modern biopics, it is a work in thrall to another, better work: a hanger-on, a groupie.
Watching Deliver Me From Nowhere, I wondered to myself: what is it that people get from these types of films? Past biopics have focused on artists I truly revere — Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Elton John, N.W.A, John Lennon, Elvis Presley, Whitney Houston — but for me, Springsteen is a different thing altogether, and watching this film as a superfan was an intensely alienating, hollowing experience, one that had me wondering if I was alone in such a feeling. Are limp impersonations like these the kind of thing that gets a Freddie Mercury fan going when they watch Bohemian Rhapsody? What actually is the appeal here? I know the simple answer — it’s nostalgia, pure and simple, the rockstars at the centre of these stories as reliable pieces of IP as Superman or Captain America — but has anyone come out of one of these things feeling like they genuinely know their beloved artist better? Maybe it’s actually about ego — are we just looking to have our love of said artist authenticated by the big cinema treatment? Surely it’s not about the songs themselves, re-recorded with careful attention paid to aping the artist as closely as possible, but in being such a base facsimile never quite capturing the lightning-in-a-bottle magic that made us fans in the first place. If you want to listen to your favourite albums in a cinema format, Pitchback Playback is right there.
In terms of impersonation, much has been made of star Jeremy Allen White’s ‘transformation’ into the Boss: the star of The Bear is ascendant, currently, and has evidently been lured by the same promise of Oscar attention and limelight-sharing as all the other hungry young actors looking for their breakout moment. That he only sort of looks like Springsteen if you squint isn’t necessarily a problem in abstract — hilariously, the only moment I truly felt like I saw Springsteen was a shot of White reclining in a chair in the recording studio, a muscled bicep entirely covering his face. These performances can only ever be an interpretation, it’s true, but what makes White’s performance fail is largely a symptom of the flattening nature of Deliver Me from Nowhere in general, toward Springsteen’s emotional landscape and his artistry both. Tasked with playing a man burdened by guilt and depression, White plays it straight down the middle — sombre, haunted, drained. It’s hardly an original or stirring depiction of what depression is really like, but more importantly, it’s a choice that puts up walls against understanding this character, rather than opening doors. There’s little of the magnetic, cheeky, livewire intensity of Springsteen, not even when on stage, when White’s pretty-good vocal impersonation takes most of the attention. The focus is on the wrong things — in desperately trying to honour Springsteen, there are only ever flickers of a real person to be observed, rendering much of Deliver Me From Nowhere as a bitter slog.
Director Scott Cooper (Black Mass, Crazy Heart) dramatises the fraught period of personal struggle that led to Bruce Springsteen’s intimate masterwork Nebraska. Maintained by a committed but rarely convincing turn from The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White, it’s a painfully by-the-numbers biopic that barely scratches the surface of the rough-hewn magic of the Boss.
In assessing the successfulness of Deliver Me From Nowhere, I had to set aside the niggles of excessive fandom that plagued me throughout — that the film regularly derides the great track ‘Hungry Heart’, or renders Clarence Clemons, arguably one of the most important figures in the ‘story’ of Springsteen, as a background character without a single line are aggravating choices, but not necessarily of importance to the schema of the film. What’s less forgivable is Cooper’s insistence on expensively rendered, utterly tasteful homogeneity throughout. It’s not the fault of a committed cast: of the many impersonations in the film, the best is Jeremy Strong as Jon Landau, Springsteen’s long-time producer and champion. Perhaps because Landau is less of a spotlighted figure it gives Strong more breathing room to inhabit the character, but there’s something genuine and loving to his role here — he’s the kind of person you want in your corner, deeply passionate and trusting of the artistic vision of his client. The scenes in which Landau grapples with that trust, when faced with the overwhelming strangeness of Nebraska as a commercial product, are the closest Deliver Me From Nowhere comes to feeling like it’s offering something fresh. In the agonising, protracted battles in the studios and executive suites, one gets the sense of just how terrifying it can be to stake yourself on a work that is so daring that it is impossible to predict whether it’ll crash and burn or take off into the stratosphere. Elsewhere, Stephen Graham as Springsteen’s complicated, less-than-great father (a market that, between this and Adolescence, he seems to have cornered), is responsible for the film’s very best sequence, which just so happens to be its final one. The wonderful Odessa Young, meanwhile, valiantly strives to imbue the fledgling, doomed relationship between her single mother Faye and Springsteen with a bit of life, but is stranded in a storyline never given enough oxygen to grow into anything resonant.
The fatal flaw, though, is the film’s script and direction, neither of which are imaginative or confident enough to veer off the beaten track of well-worn biopic tropes. It’s an over-used joke that Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story killed the efficacy of any biopic to come after it forever — but it holds true as the biopic business continues to gain steam in the current cinemascape. The tropes that film mercilessly lampooned well over a decade ago still hang to the side of Deliver Me From Nowhere like barnacles, none more frustrating than the streamlined, hopelessly rote way in which it telegraphs Springsteen’s writing process (tortured black-and-white childhood flashbacks and one-to-one visual-inspiration-to-writing sequences abound). The film is intent on humanising Springsteen by showing him as a flawed individual, but never delves far enough to actually make him feel human. It makes for a curiously distant watching experience, one in which the stakes never feel especially high. The fact I checked my watch more than once during a biopic about my all-time favourite artist is a decent encapsulation of the experience — it’s a leaden film, one so hobbled by the need to over-explain itself that one leaves the cinema less enamoured to Springsteen and his work, not more. There’s a great film about Springsteen out there somewhere — he’s lived a complex and intense enough life to warrant that — but, as once was the case of Electric Nebraska, it remains the stuff of myth. Here’s hoping it materialises, somehow, somewhere down the line.
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is in cinemas now.