Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere Review

There comes a time when we have to draw a line in the sand and demand that Hollywood take a little break from music biopics, and if “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” proves anything, it’s that we’re well past it. It’s never a great sign when you watch one of these types of films and get the feeling that the creative conceit behind it was simply, “let’s make a movie about Bruce Springsteen,” and they doggedly refused to dig any deeper than that. Springsteen is a great potential subject for a biopic, but everyone involved willfully ignores anything that could make this movie interesting. Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, and especially Stephen Graham do their level best, but they’re let down by a bafflingly inept script and unimaginative filmmaking from Scott Cooper.

In “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” we’re shown glimpses of two different versions of the character. One is a young boy who is terrified of the drunkenly violent exploits of his father (Graham), but in spite of everything still deeply desires his approval. The other is a quiet, often withdrawn man (White) teetering on both the brink of superstardom and a personal breakdown. He’s flying high on the success of “Born to Run,” but now the pressure is on to develop his next record, and his reclusive and sometimes depressive nature is done absolutely no favors by the isolation of the creative process. And when he finally comes out with a rough cut of his new creative vision, it’s … well, not exactly what the record executives were hoping for. But hey, you either trust Bruce Springsteen, or you don’t.

“Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” is, if nothing else, proof that you can hire the most talented actors you can find, but if you have a garbage script, there’s not going to be much they can do with it. Throughout the entire film, every scene has amateurish dialogue riddled with groan-worthy clichés that do nothing to further the development of any of its characters. At no point do you feel much of anything for any of them — it’s almost as if there’s a glass wall between us, preventing any genuine emotions from escaping off the screen. 

And you know those movies that go overboard with exposition, where the characters say things like, “Hey, you remember that time when we were in high school together?” so that the audience knows the exact nature of their relationship? “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” is pretty much the total opposite of that. At no point is it even remotely interested in establishing relationships, giving us any sense of the passage of time, or engaging in traditional narrative structure. Springsteen’s got a girlfriend (Odessa Young), but when they argue about him being distant, their relationship is so vague it’s difficult to tell if they’ve gone on three dates or 13, or if she’s mad that he didn’t call for a weekend or a month. The end result is a narrative so muddled that the film isn’t so much running as it is stumbling along, momentum dying a swift death with each passing step.

The storyline revolving around the broken relationship between Bruce Springsteen and his father is the only one that has any nuance, and this is at least partly because of how much Stephen Graham is able to capitalize on even weak material. “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” makes space for the idea that it’s possible to have a dad who was difficult, even abusive, and to still want to have a relationship with them; to acknowledge their shortcomings while also seeing them as a flawed human rather than a monster. But even this potentially moving storyline is cut off at the knees, because the script is incapable of giving us information in a way that makes any sense at all. They casually drop in references to his father’s apparently severe mental illness as though it were something that was established anywhere in the film rather than coming out of left field, another example of how muddled it can be for no reason.

Aside from this, the only other part of the film that doesn’t feel like it’s standing in wet cement is the extended sequence where Bruce is recording music in the bedroom of his rented house with Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser), creating a darker, more folk-oriented sound on pure instinct alone. Here, we get insight into his creative process, and it’s the only point where we can feel his genius as a songwriter rather than just being told. (We know his cut of “Born in the U.S.A.” is good, for example, because we see sound engineer Chuck Plotkin [Marc Maron] nodding in astonishment to his colleagues while they’re recording it.)

Graham is blameless. Jeremy Strong is fine. An always delightful David Krumholtz makes a meal out of the few scenes that he gets. But although Jeremy Allen White is playing Springsteen, at no point does he come across as anything other than a slightly-more-mumbly-than-usual Jeremy Allen White. The first act of “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” leads us to believe that this is going to be yet another mediocre, paint-by-number music biopic that has no particular narrative voice or overarching message, but can at least be relied upon to give audiences a few classic musical numbers to scratch that old nostalgia itch. As the film continues, however, it becomes clear that it’s something else entirely: a perplexingly bad production, one that is flawed in nearly every way that matters.

“Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” hits theaters on October 24.