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A man fighting to keep his innocence can serve as the premise to a great story. It’s real to life and a struggle that nearly everyone has to face at one point or another. To stay true to yourself, you must stay true to where you came from. You must always be honest about your origins and never turn your back on the milieu from which you emerged.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere tells exactly this kind of story. It takes place what was arguably the creative high point of Bruce Springsteen’s legendary career: that unparalleled, decade-long run of greatness starting in 1975 with his breakthrough record Born to Run and culminating in 1984’s multi-platinum blockbuster Born in the USA and its subsequent worldwide tour. You’d be hard pressed to find a single rock n’ roller who maintained such a high level of artistic brilliance and commercial success for such a long period of time.
Deliver Me from Nowhere begins in 1981 after the end of Springsteen’s successful tour supporting his 1980 record The River, which spawned the Boss’ first top-10 hit, “Hungry Heart.” You’d think Springsteen (played by a brooding Jeremy Allen White) would be riding pretty high at this point, but actually he’s riding pretty low and facing depression from the pressures of incipient superstardom. The record label executives are suuuuper excited about Bruuuuce and want more hits, and perhaps a record of outtakes or a live album they can dump on the public. It falls on Springsteen’s hyper-focused manager Jon Landau (played by Jeremy Strong) to convey this to his budding star while remaining respectful to his artistic sensitivities. Springsteen has many of those. In fact, the last thing he wants at this stage in his career is superstardom. Instead of recording the next plethora of smash hits with the E-Street Band, he rents an isolated home in Colts Neck, New Jersey, near where he grew up in Freehold. All wants to do is read Flannery O’Connor and record bleak songs on antiquated equipment about murderers and outcasts. He can only hope that his band will ultimately work its magic on the final product.
Springsteen seems dimly aware that all this success is going to corrupt him somehow and lead him away from his origins. The problem is that his origins are not so nice. He has daddy issues and appears to have inherited the same psychoses which turned his father into a chain-smoking, abusive drunk in the 1950s. Despite this, Douglas Springsteen (played beautifully by the dead-eyed Stephen Graham) never quite lost his inexpressible love for his wife and children. This is the crux of Springsteen’s story—he has to look backwards before he can move forwards—and it is impeccably presented in Deliver Me from Nowhere.
The good thing about reviewing biopics like this one is that, since the events are on the public record and many actually lived through them as fans, spoilers are less of a concern. In 1982, Springsteen did release his collection of primal, desolate acoustic tracks on a record called Nebraska, which is arguably his best. (The lyrics “deliver me from nowhere” close out two songs on Nebraska—the chilling, nigh-sociopathic “State Trooper” and the Eddie Cochran send up “Open All Night”). While recording it he insisted that there be no press, no tour, no hits. He didn’t even want his face on the cover. The album climbed to number three on the charts regardless. Of course, worldwide fame, fantabulous fortune, MTV omnipresence, and his quickie tabloid marriage would come a few years later, after Bruce put some of his issues to bed—which we see him do. There is a happy ending.
Scott Cooper (both as director and screenwriter) and cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi do what good filmmakers should—they put the audience in what I call “the zone of the moment” wherein a viewer can occupy the life, mind, and space of a character onscreen. In this zone, suspense can be as mundane as everyday life and still keep the audience enthralled. In the story, Springsteen does not have his life straightened out, and so Cooper directed White to often lean one way or another when interacting with people. White’s performance can be described as diagonal, which I noticed about halfway through the picture—only after I had been impressed by its power.
There’s little gorgeous imagery in Deliver Me from Nowhere. When not presenting Springsteen battling his demons while sprawled out on the carpet of his rented abode, Takayanagi pens us in with gritty New Jersey towns, greasy spoon diners, narrow city streets, and—as one would expect given Springsteen’s music—impressionistic visions of amusement parks. This makes the flashback scene in which young Bruce and his sister run through a cornfield before a great mansion on the hill all the more breathtaking. “Mansion on the Hill,” appears on Nebraska and is one of the best songs ever recorded to depict the unfathomable gulf between rich and poor.
The seamless way in which editor Pamela Martin takes us from black-and-white flashbacks to present-day color and back again as Springsteen haunts his childhood enhances the film immeasurably. Despite the stark differences in film stock the transitions sneak up on you in a way they never did (or could) in American History X, which uses the same technique. Cooper also had White and Graham affect some of the same mannerisms and emote the same hunted expression as if they have the same hellhound on their trails. Not a whole lot happens during long stretches in the story, but it’s never slow.
The script, which is based on Warren Zanes’ book Deliver Me From Nowhere, is also excellent. There are no long speeches, no hints of sentiment or nostalgia, no sense of reliving rock’s glory days. No jokes either, but that also means nothing falls flat. The closest we get is when Springsteen buys his first new car. The salesman recognizes him and says, “I know who you are.” Bruce responds, “That makes one of us.”
It seems that Cooper applied a minimalist approach when it came to dialogue and let the camera do the talking whenever possible. The performances are all on point, especially those of White, Strong, and Graham. Paul Walter Houser shines as Springsteen’s portly recording engineer. We may remember Hauser from his breakthrough performance as the eponymous character in Richard Jewell. David Krumholtz plays the hit-obsessed, and likely Jewish, record executive with just enough sardonic smarts to repel and attract audiences simultaneously. Marc Maron as the sound mixing engineer has a memorable scene in which he delicately explains to Springsteen why he cannot remove the distortion and other imperfections from the substandard Nebraska recordings.
Odessa Jones is frankly delightful as Springsteen’s ephemeral love interest. She’s not based on a real person, and it does stretch believability that such a lovely and engaging woman could both work as a waitress and be single for any meaningful period of time. But since Springsteen has no one else in southeast Jersey he can unburden himself to—and since this is, after all, a movie—it is fitting to insert a little desperate and ill-fated romance into the story. It’s right out of side B of Born to Run. She basically tells him that he’s chasing down his roots while running away from them at the same time—which makes him no good to anyone. Their tender breakup scene recalls Brando and Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront—high praise indeed.
I was also gratified to see that the filmmakers remembered to include Springsteen’s fascination with Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop” during this period in his life. It’s an obscure yet terrifying song, and Springsteen reportedly listened to it incessantly while recording Nebraska.
Yes, Bruce Springsteen has grown insufferably woke in his old age. And yes, in 2018 Scott Cooper gave us the insufferably woke western Hostiles. Nonetheless Delivery Me from Nowhere succeeds, not merely for its technical strengths, but also because Springsteen’s story as a young man is so poignant. It’s a story he captured beautifully in his music, and this film pays due homage to it. To stay true to oneself and resist corruption, a person must never turn his back on the milieu from which he sprang. And it doesn’t matter if this milieu is a small town in New Jersey, or an entire class, nation, or race. In the end, we all get delivered from somewhere.
9 comments
Very respected in England during the period you mention. Darkness on the Edge of Town was the underrated album, I thought.
In the end, we all get delivered from somewhere.
Are we now, I sincerely hope you’re right. Great article. 🙃
There is a great line in The River which seems like it might explain political differences/similarities between a liberal dad and his zoomer daughter. “I just act like I don’t remember. Mary acts like she don’t care”.
Born to Run, Darkness, and Nebraska are his best. Wild & Innocent comes next, then the River, which would rank higher if it’s 10 best songs appeared on a single record. The rest is tolerable with some flashes of greatness IMO.
His first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, did not get the national attention of some of the later stuff. No top 40s hits, but all but one of the songs were first-rate and they established the Springsteen tone and image of blue collar desolation. Less studio production and more of a garage band feel to it. It sounded very new and exciting. If you listened to the first two albums (The Wild, the Innocent, and the E-Street Shuffle was the second) as they came out, Born to Run (third album) almost sounded redundant, like Springsteen was becoming a cliche of himself. My two cents, as somebody who was in my peak album-buying years then. (Also had my first roller coaster ride on the Asbury Park boardwalk.)
Apologies for commenting on a locked article that I obviously haven’t earned the right to read and therefore comment on. Just some musings on Springsteen. As a millennial I only came to learn of Springsteen following the release of The Rising, which he apparently wrote and recorded in just a few months following the September 11th attacks, and was dedicated to them. An album that told us all to heal and forgive, “beneath Allah’s blessed rain,” but to also have “a little revenge” (don’t become “islamo-phobic,” but let’s all support the war in Afghanistan). Basically laying down the desired establishment programming. Oddly specific, oddly timely. Since then he’s always been “oddly timely” – always cropping up in just the right moments in just the right Democrat circles supporting just the right talking points and candidates to usher the white working class into voting for whatever anti-white nastiness they were cooking up. As a result I have come to loathe the man somewhat and I see him as just some golem. As a white man I feel patronized and offended when I watch this rock star try to appeal to my white working class sensibilities. I’m glad nobody gives a care about his ivory tower social commentary anymore.
True enough. But “Into the Fire” from The Rising is one of the best songs he ever wrote. When he focuses on relationships and themes like hope and loss, there’s none better when he’s on point.
Springsteen was very prescient back in 1984:
Main Street is whitewashed windows
and vacant stores
Seems like nobody wants to go
down there no more
they are closing down the
textile mills across
the railroad tracks
they say these jobs are going boys
and they aint coming back
to your hometown
The irony is that as The Boss went hard left you know for sure that the great preponderance of his fans back in the 70s and 80s now support Trump.
True that. His music has not been allowed in my home since he started buddying around with Obama.
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