{"id":186364,"date":"2025-08-30T04:18:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T04:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/186364\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T04:18:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T04:18:08","slug":"jeremy-allen-white-as-springsteen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/186364\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tJust as A Complete Unknown<\/a> escaped the dreary conventionality of cradle-to-grave music biopics by surveying the nascent period in the stardom of its unknowable subject, Bob Dylan, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere<\/a> makes affecting gains by focusing on the Artist as a Depressed Young Man. Which is not to say Scott Cooper\u2019s Bruce Springsteen<\/a> portrait is a downer. If you\u2019re looking to celebrate the anthemic hits of blue-collar New Jersey\u2019s favorite son, this highly personal movie might not meet your requirements. But serious fans \u2014 particularly those who admire the lo-fi 1982 album Nebraska \u2014 should connect with the intimate drama.<\/p>\n

\n\tReleased between the seminal 1980 double album The River and the definitive leap to superstardom four years later with Born in the U.S.A., Nebraska was a bold career move and not the fresh crop of Top 10 singles for which Columbia Records likely was hoping. A thematically dark acoustic collection built from a DIY recording, it was inspired by Flannery O\u2019Connor stories, Terrence Malick\u2019s Badlands, late \u201850s spree killer Charles Starkweather and Springsteen\u2019s unaddressed childhood trauma.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tSpringsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tA nuanced portrait suffused with heart and hurt.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue<\/strong>: Telluride Film Festival
Release date<\/strong>: Friday, October 24
Cast<\/strong>: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham, Odessa Young, Gaby Hoffman, Marc Maron, David Krumholtz
Director-screenwriter<\/strong>: Scott Cooper, based on Warren Zanes\u2019 book
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t2 hours\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tAll this presents Jeremy Allen White<\/a> with something of a challenge in the title role, and though his resemblance to Springsteen is minimal, he digs deep into the musician\u2019s brooding interiority during a low period that ultimately resulted in him seeking overdue treatment for depression. He plays the rugged character, dressed in his uniform of plaid flannel shirt, jeans and leather jacket, as a man physically burdened by his demons.<\/p>\n

\n\tEarly on, Cooper slips in an exhilarating performance interlude with Bruce and the E Street Band tearing up the Cincinnati Coliseum stage in 1981 with \u201cBorn to Run.\u201d (White\u2019s vocals are mixed with Springsteen\u2019s in the live performances.) But this is an altogether more introspective movie than that scene suggests. Coming down from the massive 12-month River Tour, Bruce is 32 and lost. He tells his longtime friend and manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong<\/a>): \u201cI just need to get home and slow things down a little.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tJon secures him a rental in a quiet, woodsy part of Colts Neck, N.J., where he tries to figure out what to do with himself. Occasionally, he revisits his bar-band days at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, but while Columbia is pushing Jon to steer him onto the next \u201cHungry Heart,\u201d Bruce is more preoccupied with feeling estranged from the world he knows best.<\/p>\n

\n\tEven a tentative spark of romance with single-parent diner server Faye (Odessa Young), the younger sister of a schoolmate he struggles to remember, becomes difficult for him to sustain in some of the most poignant scenes.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe rabbit hole of memory opens up when Bruce drives by his childhood home, now a sad, dilapidated residence in a working-class neighborhood, his parents having relocated to California. But the fear he often felt around his volatile father Doug (Stephen Graham<\/a>), a drunk with violent mood swings, and the anxiety of his protective mother Adele (Gaby Hoffman) are still very much with him.<\/p>\n

\n\tCooper switches to black-and-white for flashbacks, a well-worn memory device that works here thanks to longtime DP collaborator Masanobu Tayayanagi\u2019s textured visuals and a persuasive sense of the milieu. Young actor Matthew Anthony Pellicano Jr.\u2019s vulnerability as preteen Bruce also makes those episodes come alive \u2014 a scene in which his dad takes him to see The Night of the Hunter is especially memorable. And Graham (superb in Adolescence<\/a>) subtly introduces redeeming nuances that will deepen in some genuinely moving father-and-son scenes toward the end.<\/p>\n

\n\tTo some extent, this is a making-of-an-album movie, a significant part of it spent on Bruce\u2019s time writing and recording songs on a four-track tape recorder in his bedroom at the Colts Neck house. Working only with guitar tech Mike Batlan (a straggly-haired Paul Michael Hauser), he lays down bare-bones versions of songs originally intended to be fleshed out in the studio with the E Street crew. But in frustrating sessions at storied Hell\u2019s Kitchen recording studio Power Station, Bruce feels the band is overpowering the songs and insists on paring everything right back to basics, mastering the album directly from the tapes, imperfections and all.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe insights into the recording process will be fascinating to anyone interested in how music is made, even if the push-pull between Bruce and engineer Chuck Plotkin (Marc Maron<\/a>) to get the spare, echoey sound he wants isn\u2019t the most dramatically dynamic material. But there\u2019s humor in the response of Columbia exec Al Teller (David Krumholtz) to Jon\u2019s news: \u201cHe\u2019s putting out a fucking folk album?!\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile the secondary characters could have been more developed, there\u2019s a tender sense of people trying to protect Bruce, even Young\u2019s Faye, who has wrenching scenes in which she\u2019s as concerned for him as she is for her own heartache.<\/p>\n

\n\tLandau feels like Strong playing to type, but Jon\u2019s loyalty is touching, acting as a buffer between Bruce and the CBS suits. He also shares his worries at home with his wife (Grace Gummer) that the Nebraska songs are dealing with disturbing issues of guilt which he feels unable to talk about with his friend. In a piercing moment later in the film, Bruce tells him, \u201cI don\u2019t think I can outrun this anymore.\u201d Jon\u2019s pain as he confesses he feels ill-equipped to help is almost as palpable.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn addition to Graham, Hoffman also makes a strong impression as Adele. Her loyalty to her troubled husband despite everything he put her through suggests a grounded stoicism probably not uncommon in midcentury wives to whom the idea of leaving was unthinkable.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe good-looking production delivers notably in terms of sound. A Power Station scene in which the E Street Band takes a first run at \u201cBorn in the U.S.A.\u201d is a roof-raiser, though the music in general is less prominent than might be expected. At times, the bio-drama feels emotionally underpowered, but there\u2019s melancholy beauty in the fact that Springsteen felt the need to put aside surefire hits like \u201cBorn in the U.S.A.,\u201d \u201cGlory Days\u201d and \u201cI\u2019m on Fire\u201d until he got Nebraska out of his system.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe decision to portray the man not as a Rock God but as a fragile human being who\u2019s also an uncompromising artist gives Deliver Me From Nowhere a solemn integrity. Some will argue that key songs from Nebraska are missing (my longtime favorite, the hypnotic \u201cState Trooper,\u201d is heard only in passing). And anyone eager for a detailed track-by-track study of the album should turn to Warren Zanes\u2019 book, which served as the basis for Cooper\u2019s screenplay.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat the film and White\u2019s agonized, internalized performance amply convey is the state of mind from which one of the most important albums in the Springsteen canon \u2014 the one he considers his best \u2014 materialized. Movies about depression are tough, but fans invested in the subject during a transitional moment of artistic and personal catharsis will be rewarded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just as A Complete Unknown escaped the dreary conventionality of cradle-to-grave music biopics by surveying the nascent period…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":186365,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[4580,82346,171,8758,69040,59952,82349,104192,104282,104193,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-186364","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-bruce-springsteen","9":"tag-deliver-me-from-nowhere","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-jeremy-allen-white","12":"tag-jeremy-strong","13":"tag-marc-maron","14":"tag-stephen-graham","15":"tag-telluride","16":"tag-telluride-2025","17":"tag-telluride-film-festival","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-unitedstates","20":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115115793139882547","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186364\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}