Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere review - the story of the Boss who isn't boss of his own head

There’s something about hauntingly performed songs written in the first person that can draw us in like nothing else. As songs from Robert Johnson to Leonard Cohen remind us, they can take us into the mental recesses of their subjects – for instance, malcontents and killers – better even than a novel or a movie. We’re kidnapped by the voice.

Bruce Springsteen seemed to insist on this more than anyone with his rough and unready 1982 album Nebraska – an echoing prairie lament for lost sanity – and ended up kidnapping himself, to judge by this new biopic that painstakingly traces the LP’s tricky gestation.

From his earliest songs, with their operatic tableaux of street-fighting, deluded dreams and blunt-force romancings, through to this mature period, there was always something bleak about Bruce. The cheesy video for the hit single “Dancing in the Dark”, in which he cavorts on a concert stage with a very young Courteney Cox, is in fact a song about a guy stuck in his room. Another hit, “I’m on Fire”, seemingly an ode to lust, contains the lines: “Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull, and cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my skull.”

Yet those two songs were on the album Born in the USA which shot Springsteen into the commercial stratosphere two years on from the brooding events highlighted here. Nebraska makes those two numbers sound like “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” by Belinda Carlisle. It kicks off with a track described from the POV of 1950s spree-killer Charles Starkweather – a psychotic lullaby in which Starkweather asks that his girlfriend be placed on his lap when he’s in the electric chair – and things don’t cheer up much from there.

Writer-director Scott Cooper begins with Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) at one of his mass-rally concerts (it looks remarkably authentic, to anyone who’s been to one) and then takes us through a meticulous journal of how Nebraska went from jottings in felt tip to the master disc literally being cut on some old-fashioned lathe.

Winding down from a tour at the start, and a bit unmoored, Springsteen closets himself in a scruffy New Jersey bedroom to lay down what he thinks will be sketchy demo tracks on a home-taping machine. He’s in his early thirties. Watching Terrence Malick’s masterful Badlands (1973), based on the Starkweather case, he sets to work.

Yet the rasping, yowling threnody that emerges – rocka-hillbilly horror stories and canticles of loss, set mostly to guitar and harmonica – can’t be re-created in the studio, and Springsteen starts a battle to get the demo put out to the public just as it is. As the artist descends into Job-like despair, his manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) needs the patience of that biblical figure to persuade the record company to go along with the hare-brained idea – not far off from asking Michael Jackson to put out Thriller as a 78.

Cooper reinforces his reputation as a subtle and ruminative craftsman. He’s best-known for the Jeff Bridges movie Crazy Heart (2009), about a grizzled country singer, though his 2013 Out of the Furnace may have persuaded Springsteen to give this project the OK – a saga of troubled brothers, wrecks on the highway, killings and closing mills that could have come straight from the Boss’s songbook. Cooper is good at relationships, which is just as well as this film is largely about a guy’s relationship with himself. We see him struggling to find an audience in the concert crowds, in his family, in his neighbourhood and in his own head.

Deliver Me From Nowhere is adapted from a book about Nebraska by Warren Zanes and sticks closely to it, but Cooper adds a fictional, fragile romance for Bruce with a sparky waitress played by Odessa Young – a fine woman trying to fix him, as in many a rock biopic, though the relationship sits a little awkwardly atop the real-life events. But the movie looks good and the performances run fairly deep.

Strong has his usual clipped intensity as a nebbishy, obliging Jon Landau. And Merseyside’s Stephen Graham excels as Springsteen’s old man – a bantam-cock shown in flashbacks who alternately bullies the young Bruce (Matthew Pellicano Jr) and takes the child on quixotic car rides and a trip to watch The Night of the Hunter. A group of close Springsteen aides who might have lightened the mood – his famous E Street Band – are non-player characters outside of music-making.

Jeremy Allen White (who stars in The Bear on the Disney streaming service) sings impressively yet has few chances to escape the relentless mopiness of this phase, at least, of Bruce’s life. White’s character is still caught between fleeing his childhood home and wanting to return to it, and this elastic band propels him towards a full-on breakdown. It’s as if the exuberance of his concerts speaks to the spirit of his upbeat mum (played fleetingly by Gaby Hoffmann), while the bleakness of his songs reflects that of his ornery dad.

In contrast to the knockabout way some other recent pop biopics have handled their subjects (not least the Robbie Williams one, Better Man, which had a harsher approach to father-son stuff), there’s a sense of Cooper treading lightly in the shadow of the 76-year-old colossus still lurking in Jersey, albeit the film fits well with the director’s other work – stories of white working-class men trying to find an honest manhood.

Against the odds, the murky, sheared-off sound of Nebraska became a succès d’estime among critics and musicians, and remains so today. Recorded in a bedroom, the album anticipated the era of uploaded music of 20 years later. And it’s funny to think of it, but maybe Bruce Springsteen, no less, in his own emotional hermitage, was more than a little way to becoming the world’s first incel.

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