Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere Is a Biopic Without Mystique

Deliver Me From Nowhere includes frequent black and white flashbacks to Springsteen’s boyhood in Freehold, New Jersey, where he was raised by an adoring mother (Gaby Hoffman) and a drunk, abusive father (Stephen Graham). This fits with the background Springsteen describes in his memoir, though the extent of the physical abuse portrayed on-screen exceeds what has been previously disclosed. In the film’s main timeline in the early 1980s, Jeremy Allen White effectively channels mid-career Springsteen as a man haunted by that past and terrified of forming meaningful human connections. A decent fraction of the movie concerns his relationship with a fictional hometown waitress and single mom played by Odessa Young, apparently a composite of real girlfriends from this era, whose character exists mainly to demonstrate Springsteen’s brokenness. On the brink of solidifying his stardom, his inclination is instead to bare his wounded psyche to the world.

It’s a move that baffles not only Columbia exec Al Teller (the always nebbishy David Krumholtz) but also Springsteen’s longtime manager and guru, Jon Landau, played by Jeremy Strong as the film’s real hero, the only one who can save Springsteen from himself. Landau serves not only as the essential intermediary between the reclusive Springsteen and the record business, but as the empathetic father Springsteen never had. He shepherds Nebraska to release on the exact terms Springsteen specified, maintaining the Boss’s artistic integrity even as he questions the wisdom of it, and then he tells Springsteen to get the professional psychiatric help he urgently needs. Confronting a therapist for the first time in his new home in Los Angeles, Springsteen breaks down in tears, just as he says he did in the memoir.

We don’t see any of the actual therapy beyond that, but we’re told that it worked; that within a year, the E Street Band was touring again. In 1984, Springsteen released the polished Born in the U.S.A., featuring the backside of his jeans as snapped by Annie Leibovitz on the cover and including multiple obvious hits he refused to put on Nebraska, including the title track—which, although it’s actually a bleak story about a Vietnam vet abandoned by his country, was nonetheless adopted by Reagan-era conservatives as a patriotic hymn. That album sold over 30 million copies, and critics loved it and still do, but in hindsight it represents the peak of Springsteen’s career. He’s released a lot of good music since, but he’s never had anything left to prove, and after 1987’s Tunnel of Love he mostly stopped writing about his own pain, embraced the joys of parenthood, and accepted his ongoing role as a sort of national bard.