By In my freshman year of high school, I read Battle Royale by Koushun Takami for the first time. I loved the pulpy, almost edgelord tone of the book (again, I was 15), but more than anything, I was taken by one particular affectation of protagonist Shuya Nanahara. In the dystopian fascist Japan in which the novel is set, rock and roll is banned, and Shuya is a rocker. Moreover, Shuya’s favorite rocker is Bruce Springsteen. I had not yet explored the material of the Boss, but I knew my mom was a big fan. As luck would have it, my dear, sweet Midwestern Catholic grandparents had his two-CD Greatest Hits on deck, so that quickly entered into rotation on my iPod Video. A semester later, “Born to Run” was my MySpace profile page song. I wanted to be Bruce Springsteen. I would watch this clip of him performing “Thunderstruck” pre-fame and he seemed like the absolute coolest motherfucker who ever lived. Let’s forget that in hindsight his opening rap for this song is about dating an underage teen. The 1970s, folks!
Bruce was among my first models of masculinity. Earlier in my youth, I had other major heroes—Kurt Cobain, Luke Skywalker, Pee-wee Herman—but Bruce was my first as a full-fledged teen. Everything Bruce did or said is what Cool Guys were like. Moreso than BORN TO RUN, moreso than my mom’s beloved BORN IN THE U.S.A., my favorite Springsteen album was always NEBRASKA. Stripped completely of the pomp and circumstance of his material with the E Street Band (RIP Big Man and Danny) NEBRASKA hones the Boss’ songwriting to a pristinely elemental simplicity. Gone is the Dylanesque cavalcade of freaks, vaudevillians, and guys that permeate the early material; gone is the majestic, romantic tramp born to run, gone is the stark tales of working class stoicism. Gone even is the thrilling release of songs about cars and girls. Instead, we are treated to a somber, sparse, spare set of songs. Haunting songs. Harrowing songs. Howling songs. Lo-fi songs. Recorded essentially on a boombox and mixed down to cassette, NEBRASKA stood in stark contrast to Bruce’s most recent achievement, his first Top Ten hit, “Hungry Heart.” These dark, spooky arrangements cast a foreboding and sinister shadow of the American undercurrent that permeated the fringes of the Boss’ music before, but was here presented in monochrome. Musically influenced by Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, and the Motorik proto-synthpunk duo Suicide, as a 15-year-old, it was by far the coolest album by the coolest guy to exist.
And yet here we are. The weekend before Halloween, 20th Century Fox released SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE, the first fully fledged biopic of the Boss. Directed and written by Scott Cooper, the script is adapted from the book of the same name by Warren Zanes. And the story of NEBRASKA works in book form—Bruce was also extremely lyrically influenced by John Steinbeck and Howard Zinn while making the record—but as a movie? You would have to be a complete idiot to think NEBRASKA would work on film. In a turgid cultural ecosystem, essentially the Turbo ‘80s, we are besotten by post-BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY biopics that consistently mine the well tapped by WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY. DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE pulls off the magnanimous task of sucking from both of these ends. It’s not only extremely rote, cliché, and beneath the material, but it’s also turgid Boomer hagiography that actively makes Bruce seem like more of a sadsack dipshit loser than he really is. It didn’t have to be this way.
Spearheaded by a pursed, confused performance by Jeremy Allen White, things settle in fine at first before quickly getting mired in tangential flashbacks of a noided Bruce bugging out over tape distortion in his abandoned family home, and an absolutely dreadful love story centered around a completely made-up single mother named “Faye” that Bruce shacks up with over the course of making the album. The first time Bruce goes on a date with “Faye” he turns the lights on in an abandoned amusement park on the Jersey Shore. It was at this point in the movie—maybe 20 or 30 minutes in—where I started thinking, “What the fuck? Who the FUCK is this for? Did Bruce request this scene as producer?” These questions resumed for the rest of the runtime.
The entire movie plays out like this. You see “Bruce” pensively staring at a pier or the Jersey Shore or an abandoned amusement park or a county fair in a leather jacket, and you go, “Goddamn, he IS Bruce Springsteen,” and then he opens his mouth and talks like Joe Pera and sings like Tim Heidecker. Bruce Springsteen—the wild, innocent, erstwhile rocker who is nothing if not in his element several hours into a sweaty four-hour-plus performance—is reduced to a chud who is too scared to even play his guitar or sing properly. White clearly cannot sing or play a lick of guitar, and Bruce or some other producer clearly wanted in on the Timothée-as-Dylan Oscar buzz. So many scenes of “Bruce” picking up or putting down his guitar are deftly edited to show that he wasn’t actually playing it or singing whatsoever. Performance footage edited around “Bruce”’s inability to play, leaning on fucking Greta Van Fleet of all bands as his backup at the Stone Pony. What year is it? Greta Van fucking Fleet? The reasoning is clear. This is a movie for pseuds, made by pseuds.
There are a lot of entry points you could key into in order to tell Bruce’s story in a cinematic fashion. In a way that set him aside from other post-Dylan singer-songwriters and contemporaries like Tom Petty, Bob Seger, Warren Zevon, Tom Waits, Neil Young, et al., Bruce became so popular because he was able to truly capture the carnival swirl of Dylan’s thin, wild mercury sound. He was signed to Dylan’s former label, Columbia, and was “discovered” by Dylan’s former talent scout John Hammond—the heir apparent. Bolstered by his gotta-please bar band energy, his crack band of compatriots, and the evocative characters and perspectives of his ne’er-do-well louse protagonists that peppered his songs and scene-setting, Springsteen also seemed the most poised to be captured on celluloid. Cinema is a major component of the Springsteen mythos. He had already composed songs titled after, if not directly based on, films that he loved: THUNDER ROAD, BADLANDS, ATLANTIC CITY. By the 1980s, several films were titled after his own songs, used his songs in them, or were seemingly directly inspired by him (RISKY BUSINESS, EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS, STREETS OF FIRE). He could have been poised to be a movie star himself if he could act. He has a great ass.
Bruce Springsteen didn’t start out as Boy Taylor Swift, but he is quickly aging into that. Taylor Swift (and by extension, self-proclaimed Bruce acolyte Jack Antonoff) very obviously model their careers on Bruce’s. At this point, Taylor has released her 12th album, THE LIFE OF A SHOWGIRL, and despite a mixed response is dominating the Billboard Top 100. Taylor is something like our modern Bruce Springsteen AND Michael Jackson, although less relevant without as strong a monoculture. By the time Bruce was on his 12th album, it was the post-9/11 E Street Band-reunion record THE RISING: probably the last truly relevant and great music he will release in his lifetime. The hard truth of Bruce Springsteen is that since becoming a superstar in 1984 with BORN IN THE U.S.A., he’s spent the next four decades of his career seemingly lost when not touring, releasing albums with increasingly awful cover art and worse material. From 1973 to 1984, Springsteen had one of the most bulletproof discographies in rock, and he could have released even more classic material if TRACKS was any indication. What the Hell happened?
In DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE, “Bruce” is never having fun. He’s constantly moping around with his hands in his leather jacket pockets. Why isn’t he hanging out with the E Street Band? The movie cuts to him performing at the Stone Pony several times, but “Bruce” is performing with Greta Van Fleet, and he still looks like he wants to jump out of his skin. Maybe it’s partly because he can’t actually play guitar or sing, and maybe it’s because he’s always performing with fucking Greta Van Fleet, whose anachronistic look takes you right out of the movie despite being the “vintage” youth rock fad band for the Boomer algorithim.
The movie seems to settle into several different grooves and pulls on threads that it never fully commits to or resolves. An early “Mansion on the Hill” scene makes you think the entire movie is going to be some kind of awful visualizer for every song on the album. Where the fuck is the “Highway Patrolman”? Where is the “State Trooper”? Where is the barely hidden paranoia over law enforcement at all? Early in the movie, a 32-year-old Bruce remarks that he’s “never owned a car before.” Really dude? You wrote “Racing in the Streets.” Half of THE RIVER consists of songs about fucking cars—this is either an insane lie or he is simply insane. Marc Bolan supposedly never got his driver’s license, but he clearly was sexually attracted to cars and died in a car crash. Iggy Pop is famously a passenger. Tax evasion and $20,000 to his name or not, you can’t tell me that Bruce fucking Springsteen never owned a car before the Reagan administration.
There is an INSANE love story depicted for an interminable length between “Bruce” and a completely fictitious single mother “Faye” and her young daughter that “Bruce” schleps around for most of the runtime. Why was this even added? At one point, “Faye” implores “Bruce,” “We’re real people!,” even though they are complete fabrications. What the fuck? “Bruce” mentions he’s “currently seeing someone” in his meet-cute with “Faye”—YEAH, his fucking wife, Patti Scialfa! Bruce did a ton of research when he was making NEBRASKA. The short segment where he does that research is maybe the best moment in the movie, but it’s still patently ridiculous. “Bruce” watches Malick’s BADLANDS on TV, mouth lolled open, and then proceeds to engage in a series of true crime research montages at libraries in Asbury Park. In actuality, Hell, the single best scene in the movie (bordering on Lynchian) is one where an exhausted Bruce literally crashes out his new muscle car while driving under the influence of Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop.” The climactic skid is punctuated not by Alan Vega’s primordial howl, but by “Bruce” quietly yelping. Welp. Cut to, Paul Walter Hauser’s engineer staring at Bruce as he continues listening to “Frankie Teardrop” in the House, prone on the floor. “This is the greatest record I’ve ever heard.” He’s right, but they didn’t need to say it that way.
NEBRASKA is inspired by To Kill A Mockingbird and the writing of Flannery O’Connor, both of whom use the perspective of children to tell preternatural, precocious narratives that illustrate wisdom and emotional comprehension beyond their years. NEBRASKA employs this perspective to similar effect on several songs. In SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE, this comes across as a limp, effete version of RAGING BULL. Painfully cliché childhood scenes where Young Bruce (who is doing as bad of an impression of Bruce as “Bruce” is) is sticking up for his mom and/or getting popped by his raging loser alcoholic father. The movie, alongside the overwrought “Faye” sequences, overtake the purview of the movie at the expense of the more interesting stuff. It’s pretty fucked up if your shitty dad really took you to go see NIGHT OF THE HUNTER in a theater, dude, but the movie goes on to cut to Bruce watching NIGHT OF THE HUNTER as either a child or adult every other scene. The effect made me just want to watch NIGHT OF THE HUNTER. I’ve seen NIGHT OF THE HUNTER a bunch of times too, dude, I didn’t make it my entire fucking personality.
DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE culminates in an absolutely batshit I THINK YOU SHOULD LEAVE-esque moment where “Bruce” is forced to sit on his father’s lap in an empty dressing room after performing on the BORN IN THE U.S.A. Tour. I’m really sorry you had such a shitty drunk dad, dude. You are the biggest rock star on the goddamn planet. I thought a lot about Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland and the coterie of loser hippies, burnouts, and television addicts that populate its projected vision of Greater Los Angeles in 1984. This is the ultimate ideology of the Boomers: They receive their red or blue marching orders from the Tube, determined to wage culture war as they tilt at windmills.
The only anchoring performance is the always intense Jeremy Strong as longtime Springsteen manager and #1 booster, Jon Landau. Their bond and Landau’s stoic support of Bruce is the beating heart of the film. Strong delivers the most exposition and scene-chewing of any cast member, even though he’s supposed to be portraying a muted bemusement. Landau is constantly telling Bruce his own inner monologue, reinforcing whatever he’s thinking, mostly because the rest of Bruce’s dialogue is so bad, but also because the real Landau probably is that pathologically insane about Bruce. There are entire scenes—several, plural—where Landau spouts verbal diarrhea about Bruce to his bewildered and astonished-looking blank slate of a wife. Strong delivers the material in a weird, fourth-dimensional chess routine where he’s committed to playing Landau as astutely as possible while also understanding he is single-handedly carrying this awful material on his entire back, like Bruce’s Virgil. You’d think that, but then, an hour into the movie, the movie grinds to a dead halt to rapturize how Landau was able to effectively ensure … that there wasn’t too much tape distortion in the mixdown from cassette in the studio on the record.
Bruce is much cooler than this movie lets on. David Bowie was a big initial fan! Bowie hung out with Bruce briefly—for about one stoned night—in his mid-‘70s proto-fash Philly Soul YOUNG AMERICANS era, even covering the incendiary “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City.” By the DARKNESS era, Bowie was telling the BBC he thought it sucked and he had lost interest in Bruce. Bruce had just collaborated with Patti Smith on “Because the Night,” wrote “Fire” for the Pointer Sisters, and had worked with Bowie frenemy Lou Reed on STREET HASSLE. Shortly thereafter, Bruce met Johnny Ramone for the first time in Asbury Park. Johnny asked Bruce to write a song for the Ramones, who had yet to have a hit single. Bruce came up with “Hungry Heart” that night. Jon Landau suggested Bruce keep it for himself: It was way too good for the Ramones. It was Bruce’s first Top Ten hit.
So many questions: What’s Bruce’s deal? What’s going on with Bruce? Who the fuck is supposed to care about this shit? Look, I used to be a music manager for artists who were particularly adamant about mixing down cassette demos in the studio. I get it. You’ve got to dig your heels in about whatever stupid ideas your artist has, because hopefully it’s actually brilliant. It’s always a roll of the dice. Thankfully, for Jon Landau, and for us all, Bruce struck gold with NEBRASKA. “We capture fire,” Landau says to some effect. If BORN IN THE U.S.A. is Promethean, then Bruce’s struggle was seemingly with selling out. Is that it? Is that the whole reason he’s shaking and having fucking Tony Soprano panic attacks at the El Paso County Fair in the climax? Unfortunately, SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE is such a dank shit-smear on the legacy of Bruce’s best album that the tarnish may never recover. I hope the Boss is humbled.
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