Every year, we get another one: a musical biopic of an artist that probably should’ve had one by now, centered around a performance that immediately makes it an awards contender. Last year, it was A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan. The year before that, Bradley Cooper directed himself as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro, and the year before that, Austin Butler transformed into Elvis Presley in Elvis and struggled to separate himself from the part. Yet, in a genre that is specifically talking about artists who redefined music as we know it, completely changed the game, and broke new ground, the musical biopic is arguably one of the most by-the-numbers, straightforward stories a filmmaker can tell nowadays.
And yet here we are in 2025, with another iconic musician with a well-known history who is just now getting their own biopic with Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. Cooper, who both writes and directs, smartly makes the choice to focus this story on a specific, essential period in the musician’s life, rather than tell an all-encompassing story. But once again, we find a story being told about a musician who broke the rules in a film that’s too rote and too simple to do their life justice.
‘Deliver Me From Nowhere’ Focuses on Bruce Springsteen Making Nebraska
When we first see Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) in Deliver Me From Nowhere, he’s already a massive star. Starting in 1981, we find him at the end of “The River Tour,” playing “Born to Run” with the E Street Band to a sold-out stadium. Bruce comes to life on stage as he truly gives his all, to the point that when he goes backstage, he’s completely drained — but it’s an experience we can tell he loves.
With the tour over, however, it’s time for Bruce to work on the next batch of songs for a new album. He rents a place in New Jersey and gets down to business, surrounding himself with things that will inspire him, like Terrence Malick’s Badlands, which seemingly plays on repeat, and a book of Flannery O’Connor stories that he leafs through. Yet his mind is constantly plagued by memories of his troubled childhood, having to follow his mother, Adele (Gaby Hoffman), to the bar to get his father, Douglas (Stephen Graham), to come home, where he’ll yell and fight. As Bruce says, it’s like this place and his memories are poisoning him and won’t leave his head.
It’s in this period that Springsteen will record the lo-fi versions of songs that will become known as Nebraska, a complete shift in what people expected from the man who had given the world “The River” and “Born to Run.” Springsteen’s manager and producer, Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), sees the trouble these new songs are causing Bruce, and while he wants to give the label something they can market, more than that, he trusts Bruce’s instincts and tries to do right by him. In addition to coming up with the songs from Nebraska during this period, Bruce has also written several songs on what would become the much more commercial “Born in the U.S.A.” In Deliver Me From Nowhere, we watch as Bruce puts together Nebraska, a collection of songs that he desperately needs to get out into the world without the usual pomp and circumstance of a record rollout, and the weight that this material puts on him during this process.
‘Deliver Me From Nowhere’ Is Too By-the-Numbers to Do Springsteen’s Life Justice
Scott Cooper is a filmmaker known for making fairly unembellished, entertaining yet just-fine movies. His feature debut, Crazy Heart, similarly followed a musician battling his demons and led Jeff Bridges to an Oscar win. The rest of his career has followed suit, from the OK crime thriller Out of the Furnace to the unremarkable horror of Antlers. Cooper’s films aren’t going to break the mold, but rather, he’s going to give you a middle-of-the-road version of exactly what you’d expect from whatever genre he’s playing around in at this time. That’s not to say Cooper’s work is bad — not at all — it’s just not particularly surprising either. Deliver Me From Nowhere is the type of film that will explain the history of a song like “Mansion on the Hill” by literally showing us the time Bruce’s dad took them to a mansion on a hill. Or it’ll make a knowing joke about how Springsteen will never let people hear unfinished versions of his music, knowing full well that the artist has put out such rough cuts of his albums in recent years, including to coincide with this film. If you’ve seen a musical biopic in the 21st century, you probably know exactly how Deliver Me From Nowhere will play out.
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, based on the book of the same name by Warren Zanes, struggles to present Springsteen’s fear and depression at this time without simply tying it to his childhood. We get glimpses of what his childhood was like, told in black-and-white, of having an abusive, alcoholic father, with the occasional moments of levity sprinkled throughout. We never delve deeper into who Douglas Springsteen was, and the film presents Bruce’s depression as being tied only to his childhood and nothing else. Sure, it was likely a major factor, but in a film that largely attempts to explore the darkness and depression of Springsteen’s life at this time, it does a fairly mediocre job at getting into how he was feeling at that time.
A byproduct of this is that Deliver Me From Nowhere doesn’t have any idea what to do with its female characters. After a concert at a local bar, Bruce meets Faye Romano (Odessa Young), the sister of one of his high school friends, and the two strike up a relationship at this time. Faye, however, is an amalgamation of women in Springsteen’s life, and much of her story revolves around how Bruce treats her at any given time, whether it’s showing her and her daughter love and affection or completely ignoring her for weeks on end. At one point, Faye has to remind Bruce that she’s real, that he can’t just play house with her when he wants, and it feels like the film also forgets about her existence pretty regularly.
Odessa Young is quite good at what she’s asked to do, but this issue stretches further. For example, Bruce’s mother, Adele, is also underused, as she’s primarily here to be a bridge between Bruce and his father. Most of her scenes involve her getting Bruce to go to his father, and we have zero idea who she is or how she felt about this period of her life. Even worse is the appearance of Jon Landau’s wife, Barbara Landau (Grace Gummer), who is only in the film to sit around and be a sounding board for Jon to explain his feelings about Bruce as he works on his new album. It’s clear that the women in Bruce’s life and in the surrounding stories occurring were incredibly important, but Deliver Me From Nowhere doesn’t know how to give them more character or purpose.
Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong Help Make Up for ‘Deliver Me From Nowhere’s Weaknesses
However, White is quite good at presenting Springsteen without ever doing too much of an imitation. White is especially fantastic during the few live performances we get of Springsteen songs, to the point that it makes you wish there were more in the film. White is also great at presenting the internal struggle going on with Springsteen, and making us really feel it when it all comes bursting out of him. Jeremy Strong is particularly solid as Jon Landau, who is torn between supporting the work of a creative, artistic genius and the label’s desires. Even though he knows that Springsteen’s new songs won’t be what the label wants, he knows the absolute necessity it is for Springsteen to put out this work, and supports his friend in a beautiful way. Deliver Me From Nowhere’s greatest moments stem from this dynamic between Springsteen and Landau, who portray this as two friends who came up together, trying to give each other what they need. Their bond is quite lovely and is a nice subversion of what you expect from the artist-manager dynamic in these types of films.
Throughout Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Springsteen says he’s attempting to “find something real” in his music, and similarly, as the audience, we’re trying to find something real in Cooper’s film that stands out above the noise of other formulaic musical biopics. Cooper eventually succeeds, but barely, as White and Strong stand out amongst the cookie-cutter storytelling being done here. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere can’t shake what we know about the biopic, but it does at least create some moments and provide some decent performances that make the audience forget about those clichés, at least temporarily.
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere screened at the Middleburg Film Festival. It comes to theaters on October 24.
