Artistic integrity battles psychological breakdown in Boss biopic

3 hours ago 3

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
★★½
M. 119 minutes

Some say all Hollywood music biopics are the same, but it’s not entirely so. A stronger example of the genre than most, James Mangold’s recent A Complete Unknown culminated in the famous 1966 concert where Bob Dylan (Timothee Chalamet) outraged his fans by going electric. In Scott Cooper’s more conventional Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, the trajectory is reversed.

In 1981, Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) is ideally placed to consolidate his status as the biggest rock act in the US (or the world). Instead, he retreats to his bedroom in his home town of Colts Neck, New Jersey, where he uses a four-track cassette recorder to create what one of his associates disgustedly calls a “folk album”.

It’s the age-old story of commerce versus art, a theme that Hollywood has always loved, no doubt partly because it stands in direct opposition to how Hollywood films are made. Even A Complete Unknown had it both ways, wilfully throwing the notion of authenticity out the window yet still celebrating Dylan as an antisocial genius determined to forge his own path.

Deliver Me from Nowhere has it both ways too. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that Nebraska, the acoustic album Springsteen is working on, will be a hit and one of his more enduring achievements (the film is based on a 2023 book of the same title about its creation).

Moreover, we know that in a couple of years he’ll have an even bigger hit with his follow-up album, Born in the USA. The film shows him writing and recording the first version of the anthemic title track over the same period he’s working on Nebraska, though to everyone’s despair he refuses to release it.

What is this guy’s problem? White, who bears a distracting resemblance to Dustin Hoffman, makes an unusually fragile, introverted rock star – physically slight, hunched in his leather jacket with the collar turned up, using his fame as a protective shield.

Where relationships are concerned, he’s full of romantic yearning yet unable to commit, even when he meets a woman as perfect as Faye (Odessa Young), who shares his tastes in music and makes a point of not being demanding.

Part of what he’s evidently wrestling with is his relationship with his alcoholic dad (Stephen Graham), who appears both in the present-tense portion of the film and in corny black-and-white flashbacks.

Another part has to do with his guilt at having escaped his working-class origins – which is as close as the film gets to dealing with anything political, despite taking place at the dawn of the Reagan era.

But amid the often clumsily explicit dialogue, the core of the story remains vague. It’s not wholly clear what we’re supposed to make of the connection between Springsteen and 1950s spree killer Charles Starkweather, immortalised in Terrence Malick’s 1973 film Badlands, which in turn served as an inspiration for Nebraska’s title track.

A more dramatically interesting question is where stubborn artistic integrity gives way to psychological breakdown, and how far the two can be told apart. Ultimately, the story appears to be less about its mopey protagonist than about the supporters determined to have his back at all times, especially his producer and manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong, once again playing the guy behind the guy, as he did as Roy Cohn in The Apprentice).

At first, the film appears to be pitting Landau the uptight money man against Springsteen the free-spirited artist. But the most touching aspect of the film is how Landau gradually emerges as the best friend any artist could hope to have.

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is in cinemas from Thursday

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