Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

It seems that these days, if you’re a younger man and you haven’t got mental health issues, are you just in denial? A generation ago, however, Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) struggled with depression, although this film took practically the entire running time to get there. To be fair, it wasn’t entirely clear in the moment if he was just going through the sort of struggles many creative minds find themselves confronting – ever the perfectionist, in this case finding that a recording studio isn’t recreating the same sort of emotions and atmosphere Springsteen found when he first played his songs in his own bedroom. As someone who finds themselves in a theatre far more often than a cinema, that, to me, is precisely the point of a live experience: it can never be fully replicated. Every experience is unique. The same songs performed by the same people in the same musical can have a vastly different reaction from night to night.

Springsteen’s long suffering manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong – this film seems to like its Jeremys) has to explain to the powers that be at Columbia Records that Springsteen’s sixth studio album, Nebraska, was to receive no promotional work from ‘The Boss’ whatsoever, and no singles were to be released. Springsteen’s fanbase will, I presume, be aware that a couple of singles were indeed released, albeit in Europe – nonetheless, as this film would have it, it was Springsteen’s vision that the album should be appreciated as a complete work.

There’s a fair amount of storyline here – even if at times it didn’t feel like it – as the narrative lurches between Springsteen’s personal and the professional lives. He had, by any stretch of the imagination, a rather traumatic childhood – his younger self is portrayed by Matthew Pellicano Jr. – largely thanks to his father Douglas’ (Stephen Graham) tendency towards domestic violence and excessive drinking. There came a point at which this story ticked all the ‘triumph over adversity’ boxes: detractors who didn’t like Springsteen’s songs for whatever reason, and his struggles to maintain a decent relationship with love interest Faye Romano (Odessa Young), who was working for not very much money as a server in a café, something to do with that horrid childhood that left him emotionally underdeveloped.

The Bruce Springsteen in this motion picture, however, is a complex man, and the film is careful not to idolise him. I’m not wholly convinced all of the live gig stuff was necessary – to me, it was like watching a musical when a song comes along and you’ve got to sit there and wait for it to finish before the story can continue. There’s no gain without pain, it seems, and the film asserts, without being too preachy about it, that Springsteen more than earned his success. It ends at a good point to end, too – before the 1984 release of ‘Born in the USA’ which propelled Springsteen to stardom. We already know all about that.

Four stars