Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
★★★★
Dir: Scott Cooper
(20th Century Studios)
“Man makes record in bedroom” does not sound like a movie pitch to get Hollywood salivating, but it’s to Scott Cooper’s credit that his film stays so close to what’s small-scale about this chapter of Bruce Springsteen’s story. He’s helped hugely by Jeremy Allen White’s portrayal of Bruce as a man paralysed by new-found fame and haunted by his non-relationship with his father. He doesn’t do much, but what he does – rocking out with the E Street Band at the end of the River tour, neck veins bulging authentically; communing with guitar and TASCAM as the quiet, strange songs of Nebraska take shape – he does magnetically.
The film takes unusual pleasure in its granular textures: the décor of the Colts Neck rental house where Whitesteen’s Nebraska writing takes place and (it’s implied) clinical depression takes hold; the faded splendour of Asbury Park’s boardwalk; the fascia of the singer’s portastudio and Echoplex effects box. They are supporting roles nearly as apt as those of Jeremy Strong – preternaturally attentive as manager Jon Landau – and Stephen Graham, stone-faced as Bruce’s dad ‘Dutch’, but hinting at issues submerged in alcohol and working-class machismo.
Springsteen’s relationship with his father – coloured-in by black-and-white flashbacks to his childhood home, where abuse is more alluded to than shown – is the film’s (and the Nebraska album’s) emotional mainspring. A critic might say it could have been handled with more precision. How much violence was there in the Springsteen home? Are we to understand it as the origin of the singer’s feelings of dislocation? We see Bruce have a panic attack. We see him weep during a visit to a psychiatrist. But the dots aren’t definitively connected. Perhaps – and perhaps this is another testament to the film’s authenticity – they never were.
In the end, the film is extraordinarily faithful to the story of the album Springsteen made amid the turmoil. Creating drama out of the preservation of a demo tape’s haunting qualities and its journey, in the teeth of record industry bafflement and hostility, into the record stores of the world, would seem daring enough. Pulling it off as Cooper and co. have done is a miracle. There’s even a scene with a vintage manual mastering lathe – the only way they found of mastering Springsteen’s Nebraska demo that preserved its unique sound – that prompts goosebumps. A mastering lathe! Goosebumps!
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Even the movie’s most blatantly fanciful element – the love interest that is, at best, a ‘composite’ of Springsteen’s mid-’70s girlfriends – is inoffensive: of a piece with a rock biopic that’s unusually respectful of music nerds, acknowledging important Nebraska touchstones such as Suicide (there’s a great scene in a car with the first album’s Frankie Teardrop razoring out of the stereo) and Charles Laughton’s atmospheric 1955 noir Night Of The Hunter. There’s even an insider gag about outtakes. What next? Scott Cooper does The Basement Tapes? Yes please!
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is in UK cinemas from 24 October.
"It was an exploratory period, and that affected everything I was doing..."
Get the latest issue of MOJO to read our exclusive interview with Bruce Springsteen about the enduring magic of his troubled masterpiece Nebraska, the release of the fabled 'Electric Nebraska' sessions and more. More information and to order a copy HERE!
