‘Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere’ Biopic Tries but Fails to Overcome Clichéd Trappings
Music biopics are in a bit of a rut when it comes to innovation lately. While there’s always the occasional film like Better Man that finds creativity within standard templates, many biopics are picked apart with critiques of their clichéd nature and inability to show us anything truly fascinating about the musicians they’re focused on. Unfortunately, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere doesn’t exactly break that trend.
Yes, Deliver Me from Nowhere plays some of the clichéd beats that make many biopics more tiresome than not, but the film’s larger problem lies in just how literal and expository it is within the lengthy 2-hour runtime. The movie feels the need to consistently tell us that Bruce Springsteen’s album is so important and it’s work that is so intertwined with him, but we never truly get why or any depth to it, which is endlessly frustrating.
Jeremy Allen White gives a strong performance as Bruce Springsteen, and the film has the occasional visual flair to keep it from being completely hollow, but Deliver Me from Nowhere is mostly a drag that may only captivate the most devoted Springsteen fans.
What’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere about?
Deliver Me from Nowhere, of course, centers on Bruce Springsteen (White), but the film specifically homes in on 1 year of his life, the year when he got the inspiration to write his most bare and personal album, Nebraska.
Adapted from the biography of the same name, written by Warren Zaynes, the film follows Bruce before the true peak of his career, when he stays in a house at Colts Neck, New Jersey, trying to find himself in stripped-back music while watching Terrence Malick’s Badlands repeatedly on his television.
When his manager, Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), isn’t being berated by record companies on the hunt for Bruce’s next big hit, he’s starting a relationship with single mother Faye Romano (Odessa Young). It’s all centered within Bruce’s inner turmoil and how it connects to this new album as he comes to face the depression and childhood trauma he’s kept bottled up for such a long time.
The clashes of frustration within the film
Deliver Me From Nowhere, at certain points, taps into a stripped-back loneliness that’s restrained and quiet, with a mood piece sensibility that is definitely appreciated, giving the broad strokes of Springsteen’s life. The film is at its best when we’re just at one with Springsteen, learning to find himself within quiet or in his more stripped-down music.
Even if Jeremy Allen White is mostly only in brooding mode, he still holds the film up from further issues, and Bruce’s relationship with his father, Douglas (Stephen Graham), is clearly at the center. The film even plays with sound design and black and white footage within the visual language, but unfortunately, none of these aspects are strong enough to completely save the film from mediocrity.
The biggest issue in director Scott Cooper’s screenplay is its overwrought nature of constantly telling us how much of a mood piece the film is or how much of a dark and personal album Nebraska is, instead of just conveying it through the ambient nature it only captures in fleeting moments. The writing is far too literal in nature to the point of almost being eye-roll worthy, with how many times the film feels the need to tell us something we’ve already seen being conveyed multiple times through the most overt metaphors.
Strong’s performance specifically suffers from the amount of expository dialogue he’s given. He’s constantly telling record labels or people close to him at the studio how much of a “dark” and “personal” album this is compared to the others. I just wish we were left to sit with the music more and feel this for myself rather than the film telling me what I’m about to observe through potentially more soulful ways. The film is so barren at times that it often skips over the potential to delve further into the emotions of depression it’s tackling.
While there are other issues like the film’s constantly dragging pace, there also lie the biopic clichés it so often seems the film wants to avoid. While it’s nowhere near as egregious as other biopics, they are still present in certain beats despite only focusing on a singular time in Bruce Springsteen’s life. Whether it’s the multiple childhood flashbacks that are effective at first but get old after a while, or how underwritten female characters such as Faye are despite a solid performance from Young, the film lacks the overall effectiveness that it’s trying to craft.
Final thoughts on Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is by no means an awful biopic, and it still manages to capture the rawness that it strives for in a few moments, but the film is never able to overcome its overbearing literal dialogue or clichéd trappings to remain effective. Somewhere within Cooper can almost hold onto something of more substance in the biopic template, but the film unfortunately falls flat most of the time.
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