Actor Jeremy Allen White looks very little like “The Boss” in *Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere,* yet his performance approximates a brooding authenticity akin to one of America’s iconic musicians. Often framed to look taller and wearing dark contact lenses to suppress his baby blues, the star of TV’s *The Bear* sings quite a bit in the film, achieving a vocal likeness that doesn’t jar with moments when we hear the authentic voice of the artist. It’s such a brave, quietly intense portrayal of Bruce Springsteen in the early 1980s—just before immense fame and success—that one wishes the movie around him were better.
Ostensibly about the making of one of Mr. Springsteen’s best albums, 1982’s *Nebraska,* the real interest in writer and director Scott Cooper’s film lies elsewhere: at the crossroads of depression and masculinity. Throughout, scenes of Mr. Springsteen looking po-faced are used to flesh out how the musician dealt with desolation, rejection, and inadequacy, with flashbacks to his childhood and scenes with his father (Stephen Graham) providing some background. One comes away from the movie believing, though, that depression rejects dramatization.
After a rollicking start as Mr. Springsteen performs “Born to Run” with the E Street Band in concert in 1981, the film settles into a minor key and shuffling rhythm for most of its runtime. Once the tour is over, the singer and songwriter returns to New Jersey, settling into a rented house near his childhood home in Freehold. Manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) is weary of his artist’s need for suburban tranquility, aware that Mr. Springsteen suffers from bouts of depression.
The musician and his band also have their first top-10 hit on the music charts, “Hungry Heart,” and Jon and the record company wish to continue the momentum by having Bruce compose more hit singles. A chance viewing of *Badlands* on television sees Bruce begin to write grim songs about disaffected killers, bad breaks, and economic depression, combining dark irony, New Jersey storytelling, and widescreen imagery.
There’s a great sequence in which the director ties a moment from that classic movie to a specific childhood memory of Bruce’s, which in turn leads to lyrical alterations, but insights into songcraft remain elusive—particularly when Bruce attempts to give his demos the full-band sound in the studio. Instead of scenes involving creative exchanges with members of the band like Steven Van Zandt, we get lifeless ones in the control room where Bruce tries to explain to Jon and engineers that his next album should be acoustic, essentially solo.
Most of the compositions recorded by Bruce at home during this period appear in their original versions on *Nebraska,* though a few of them will turn up in more elaborate arrangements on the follow-up album, 1984’s *Born in the U.S.A.* Mr. Cooper includes a couple of songs from the latter—a huge sounding and selling record—in order to enliven his storyline of folky earnestness and moodiness, one that works when set to fantastic music and melodies but rarely in cinema.
Yet once the decision is made to release 10 of the unvarnished demos as an album, the director’s look into the creative process ends, and what we’re left with is an unconvincing romance and a man with serious father issues. An actor as intelligent as Mr. Strong can do nothing with material that has Jon explaining the musicians’ behavior as if he were a psychologist, prognosticator, and poetry reciter. Still, in scenes between him and Mr. White, the actors manage to convey Springsteen and Landau’s bond.
It is the rocker’s relationship with his father, though, that propounds the harmfulness of masculine reticence and evasion—how they can lead to substance abuse, self-harm, and violence. As the film ends, nearly back-to-back scenes confirm the notion that the drama hinges on Mr. Springsteen going to therapy and that childhood trauma is at the root of it all.
Mr. Cooper makes almost no visual or verbal reference to Mr. Springsteen’s Catholicism, his views on the country’s political landscape, or the socioeconomic outlook of his New Jersey milieu. The artist’s despondency seems to stem entirely from his father’s roughness and neglect, excluding the influence of external forces or internal struggles.
This myopia drags down the film with repetitive scenes, despite its laudable intention to deal with mental crisis. Except for a few scenes at Asbury Park’s Stone Pony and other local attractions, the movie barely attempts to situate the audience. Nor does it give us much of a view of Mr. Springsteen’s mindset through imagery beyond black-and-white flashbacks, keeping viewers in the thematic flatlands of long stares and drab domestic interiors.
Unfortunately for Mr. Cooper, his film most often conveys a generalized gloom, even as in the final song of *Nebraska,* Mr. Springsteen sings of different scenarios reflecting a “reason to believe” in the human spirit and a valiant, if foolish, hope.
https://www.nysun.com/article/jeremy-allen-white-tvs-bear-accedes-to-boss-with-great-performance-in-gloomy-springsteen-biopic
