There’s a key moment midway through Scott Cooper’s new movie Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, in which the title character is writing lyrics for a song tentatively titled “Starkweather.” The song is based the notorious mass murderer Charles Starkweather who went on a killing spree in late January, 1958.
By the time he and his accomplice, 14-year-old Carol Ann Fugate, were captured, ten people had been killed.
Bruce Springsteen had grown obsessed with the Starkweather story after catching Terrence Malick’s fictional account, Badlands, on the late late show one night. As he has typically done throughout his enormously successful career, Springsteen then wrote a song about it. It began…
“He saw her standing on her front lawn, just a-twirling her baton
Him and her went for a ride, sir, and ten innocent people died.”
Deliver Me From Nowhere tries to be Nebraska in film form
At the moment in question, Springsteen crosses out the “He” and the “Him,” replacing them with “I” and “Me.” In the process, he didn’t merely turn the song, which would eventually be renamed as “Nebraska,” into a first-person account. The musician was becoming one with his material, allowing the group of songs he was writing to become more deeply personal than anything he had ever produced.
Director Scott Cooper does not call great attention to the moment. It is easy to miss, especially if you enter the movie unfamiliar with the artist, or with this particular album. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is adapted from the book of the same name (sans the name “Springsteen”) written by Warren Zanes in 2023.
In that book, Zanes, a musician himself, does a marvelous job of getting inside the head of the artist as he crafted the album Nebraska. It was a very dark time for Springsteen. Despite the roaring success of his previous album, The River, he seemed blocked. He holed up by himself in a modest suburban house in Colts Neck, NJ, not far from his childhood home in Freehold.
He began writing hauntingly beautiful songs about the lost and forgotten, tinged with long-ago regret that clouds otherwise bright days. There were no “Born to Runs” or “Hungry Hearts” in the current collection of songs.
Cooper attempts to put this struggling artist on display, and to a large extent, he succeeds. He touches on the fear and uncertainty that infected Springsteen’s thinking at the time. Through extensive black and white flashbacks, he shows at least part of the origin of the trouble.
Springsteen’s childhood was marred by the presence of an abusive father. Living on his own near his old neighborhood appears to have unlocked some demons that had long been suppressed.
As a simple narrative, Cooper’s movie shows Springsteen working his way through these songs with every intention of using them as the basis of his next album with the E Street Band. But over time, he realizes that these songs do not fit the whole rock & roll band vibe.
They are plaintive and solitary, and work best with just Bruce, singing and playing guitar. Maybe a harmonica or glockenspiel here and there. Some echoed vocals. But simple and raw. The more simple and raw, the better.
Not only that, any songs that sounded like a potential radio hit, like the anthemic “Born in the USA,” would not be part of Nebraska. No singles. No tour. No press. Bruce didn’t even want his picture on the album cover.
Through the process, his longtime friend and producer Jon Landau plays therapist for the artist and runs interference with the impatient record label. No one, including Landau, understands what Springsteen is going through but as he says to a frustrated record exec, “in this office, we believe in Bruce Springsteen.”
As a movie, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere plays almost like a film version of the album itself. It is very low key and mostly somber. That doesn’t mean it is boring, but it is not a high energy affair. It succeeds in shedding some light on the inner working of an artist in the throes of creation, but it only goes so far.
In a sense, film is not the best medium to attempt this type of story. It demands a liveliness and a forward pace that isn’t always required in other forms of communication. Zanes’ book covers the same material but it is able to go deeper and spend more time delving into the past – into motivation, desire and fear. Cooper has two hours. He must keep the story moving.
Those flashback scenes are executed very nicely, but do they really explain Bruce’s depression several decades later? Kind of. Maybe.
Cooper, who also wrote the screenplay, made several choices which may have undercut the visceral drama. The first, he really had no control over. Landau’s presence as the artist’s guardian is vital and there can be little doubt that in real life, Jon Landau has been a godsend for Bruce Springsteen. But as a film character, he becomes a problem.
Because Landau is the one who does battle with the label, Springsteen is spared that conflict. That robs the movie of potentially valuable drama. Think of Bob Dylan directly confronting those seeking to limit him in last year’s A Complete Unknown.
Here, Springsteen vents everything to a sympathetic Landau, who then engages with the outside forces. A go-between may have been invaluable in the real world, but his presence may have tamped down on the movie’s visceral drama.
The other scripting decision involves the introduction of a love interest. Faye Romano, a young, single mother from the old neighborhood, develops a romantic relationship with Springsteen which leads about where you’d expect.
As with a lot of the movie, this subplot is efficiently presented, but simply never seems to get deep enough. There are no explosions in Cooper’s story, just a lot of heartfelt expressions of hurt and sorrow.
There are also surprisingly few musical numbers. Cooper, working with composer Jacob Fraites and music producer Dave Cobb, fills the audio track with popular songs and other music, but there are few live concert moments. One of the them, the studio recording of “Born in the USA,” is very powerful, but it very nearly undercuts the film as a whole.
The movie – and the album – are defined in part by the way they stand in opposition to “Born in the USA,” which would be Bruce’s follow-up to Nebraska.
There are also several scenes of Bruce dropping by to jam with a local band at the famous Stone Pony club while in his self-imposed NJ exile. The Kiszka brothers from Greta Van Fleet and Rival Sons’ Jay Buchanon (who each have a connection to Dave Cobb), make up this band, and those scenes do help shed light on the joy Bruce can experience from playing music. But that’s largely it in terms of the high-energy music.
The acting is outstanding across the board, headlined by the intensity of Jeremy Allen White in the lead role. Jeremy Strong as Landau and Odessa Young are excellent in supporting roles. Paul Walter Houser provides some much-needed levity as Bruce’s friend, who is tech-savvy enough to plug in the home mixer used to record the Nebraska tracks.
Best of all, Stephen Graham offers a deeply felt portrait of Springsteen’s broken bully of a father, Doug. The scenes between the father and son in later life are among the best in the film.
Through it all, I kept wondering if maybe all the technical expertise – the letter perfect acting, the somber, downcast cinematography of Masanobu Takayanagi, the sharp musical soundtrack – did the film a disservice. Nebraska succeeded in part because of just how rough it was. It was a broken piece of art – even mixed on a broken old boom box that had returned from the dead and seemed to introduce ghosts into the very recording.
It's the kind of magic that is impossible to recreate, but I wonder if the movie itself had been messier and rougher around the edges, would it have conveyed Nebraska without being quite as downbeat as it turns out to be? The songs on Nebraska, for all their dark subject matter, still brim with life and energy. The movie version only hits that mark sporadically.