The line “you did the best you could” is spoken at a crucial moment in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. It’s a platitude often used as a band-aid to cover up all manner of sins. But here, in writer-director-producer Scott Cooper’s Bruce Springsteen biopic (based on Warren Zanes’ book Deliver Me from Nowhere), it feels genuine. The film centers on the making of The Boss’ 1982 masterpiece Nebraska, and positions this process as a reckoning-of-sorts for the New Jersey legend. Following the stratospheric success of Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and The River in a row, we meet Bruce (a very strong Jeremy Allen White) with little left to give. His manager and producer Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong, sparsely used but great) serves as his lifeline and trusted confidante.
After sequestering himself in a rental house, Springsteen confronts his troubled relationship with his father (Stephen Graham) head-on through simple, brutal music and lyrics that will become the album Nebraska. Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser) bears witness. Landau gets worried, the record company more so. Cooper, who started out as an actor, is a great director of actors. Here, he’s right to keep the camera on Jeremy Allen White as much as possible. The actor has a complex, off-kilter magnetism that recalls movie stars from another time. Where Cooper has struggled as a director is in pacing and camera movement. Those problems persist in Deliver Me from Nowhere. Too often are we stagnant in the frame, and there are far too many scenes of dialogue that exist simply to review the set of conflicts needed to overcome. We know the conflicts––we’re watching the movie. Poor Grace Gummer (playing Jon Landau’s wife Barbara) is saddled with prompts that allow Strong to remind us of the stakes.
Odessa Young is deeply charming as Faye, a single mother who is bewitched by (and in turn bewitches) Bruce. Unfortunately, and by design, the narrative abandons her character, an honest admission by the film’s subject (both Springsteen and Landau were involved with the production), but still the subtraction of a more engaging element. Nowhere‘s most interesting section concerns the transfer of Nebraska from tape to vinyl. Initially recorded on cheap, new devices as a means for creative reference and nothing more, Bruce falls in love with the sound he captures––a sound he and his engineers (including Marc Maron, playing Chuck Plotkin) are incapable of duplicating. There is a real, palpable tension to these scenes, and White and Strong play the stress perfectly.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere comes at a seemingly perfect time. In a post-Bohemian Rhapsody world, the musician biopic has never been more in-demand. Cooper makes the very smart decision to tap into the legend of Bruce while keeping things small and grounded. While viewers get some hits, focus remains on character. We are all fighting our own battles, every single day. Springsteen has been open about his own demons, and Cooper takes his cues from The Boss in this regard. It’s effective, emotional, and a little staid and overwritten. They did the best they could.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and opens on October 24.
The post Telluride Review: Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere Features Great Performances Inside Stagnant Frames first appeared on The Film Stage.
