‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ Is a Dull Backstage Tour

On the last Velvet Underground studio record (that featured any of the original members), Lou Reed sang about a girl — she was just five years old! — whose life was saved by rock ’n’ roll. Maybe you could identify. You know who else was saved? Bruce Springsteen.

For Lou and his protagonist, AM radio announced an exciting and different world than the one they were raised in. For Bruce, the twang of a disembodied voice backed by an electric guitar suggested a way out of his shy silence, his overbearing father’s house and his hometown.

When Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere — a compromised movie about an unwavering artist, scripted and directed by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) from Warren Zanes’ nonfiction book — begins in 1981, Springsteen is 32 years old and a star of some magnitude. But he hasn’t left New Jersey. He tours with his band, of course, and the last one (in support of The River) included a European leg, but he always comes home, although his parents have decamped to Southern California and he has no place to stay.

In honoring his roots and retaining his humility, Cooper suggests, Springsteen allows his integrity to mask unresolved childhood issues. Opening with a black-and-white sequence of his mother sending young Bruce into a bar to tell his dad to come home, the film is threaded with disturbing flashbacks of a misguided and abusive father. Bruce can banish those memories on the road (the real meaning of “born to run,” perhaps), but they invade his private hours.

Manager and advisor Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) — who famously wrote in a 1974 concert review, “I saw rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen” — has rented a house in a woodsy corner of Joisey for the Boss (played by Jeremy Allen White) to brood, write songs and occasionally venture out to a club (The Stone Pony, naturally) to play Little Richard covers with the house band.

Springsteen records his new stuff unaccompanied in his bedroom on a four-track, lo-fi Teac cassette deck. At one point, he asks the engineer pal who supplied the machine to run the tapes through an echo system so they sound, Bruce says, “like Elvis’ Sun Sessions.”

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is one of those movies where every scene has one clear and explicit purpose. (It is the antithesis of last year’s stellar Dylan movie, A Complete Unknown.) The artist’s impulse to be true to himself in the face of the pressures and expectations of success is joylessly stated and restated. More interesting, but more difficult to dramatize and potentially fraught with cliché, is the idea of going back — geographically and temporally — in order to go forward.

In this context I note that Springsteen meets a woman. Their relationship consumes a fair amount of screen time yet adds shockingly little to the movie. Faye (Odessa Young) has a blue-collar job while Springsteen is inevitably on another trajectory. Perhaps he’s attracted to the familiar — he grew up on the same streets as Faye — but his identity and his place in the world is shifting.

Unfortunately, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is constrained by a screenplay that barely nods at money and class, a character who communicates best with a pen and a guitar, and an actor who can’t convey Springsteen’s internal feelings. An aversion to melodrama is admirable, the absence of drama is not.

We could have a long, interesting conversation about the degree to which Springsteen is derivative versus original. He’s always acknowledged his influences, certainly. In the months covered by the film, he is depicted as an artist still finding his voice. When he insists on releasing the demo tapes as his next album, Nebraska, he declares to Landau, et al. that the songs resonate with him and don’t sound like anything else — forgetting how Elvis inspired him.

The larger contradiction that the movie glosses over has to do with Springsteen’s implied depression. We are given to understand that the alienation of the characters, and the bleakness of the songs, that comprise Nebraska don’t necessarily illustrate an artist’s instinctive and perhaps self-destructive rejection of mainstream success. (Neil Young’s follow-up to Harvest, Time Fades Away, is the textbook example.) Instead they are a mirror of Springsteen’s guilt-ridden and tortured soul.

However, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere makes no secret of the fact that the musician also wrote “I’m On Fire,” “Glory Days” and “Born in the U.S.A.” at the house. On the contrary, much is made of various parties wanting Bruce to release this material (with a couple potential hit singles, presumably, like the execrable “Hungry Heart” from The River) as his next record.

Some viewers, blinded by the light from the projector, will accept Scott Cooper’s depiction of an artist in breakdown confronting the demons of his childhood. It’s only rock ’n’ roll, but exorcisms should be more terrifying, and certainly more fun.

‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ opens in theaters nationally on Oct. 24, 2025.