Scott Cooper (2025)
Bruce Springsteen’s song ‘Thunder Road’ partly inspired Jim Cummings’ short and feature of the same name, which gave impetus to the film-making career of a talented writer-director-performer. Kudos to Springsteen for that, but I know little else about the Boss’s music (except that I’m not too keen to know more than I do). I’m not the right audience for Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. Scott Cooper (whose previous films include Crazy Heart (2009)) takes as read Springsteen’s musical greatness and assumes the mostly small fragments of songs heard over the course of the film’s two hours will be enough to evoke the classic whole of which they’re part. I recognised just a few song titles.
The film’s own, cumbersome title feels uneasy. It suggests that 20th Century Studios and the other production companies involved didn’t see either half of the title as commercially self-sufficient, though surely the pre-colon word would have been. (The source material for Scott Cooper’s screenplay, a 2023 book by Warren Zanes, has an even longer name – Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska – but a secondary title is conventional enough in book publishing.) Cooper’s narrative majors in the genesis of the 1982 album Nebraska and the depression that Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) was suffering at the time. There are black-and-white flashbacks to his New Jersey childhood in the 1950s, including a clip from Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), showing on the Springsteen family’s television at one point. (For this viewer, that small fragment did evoke a classic, to tantalising effect.)
It’s hardly a complaint that few songs are heard in their entirety in Cooper’s film. When you watch a screen musical, biopic or otherwise, it’s not unusual to console yourself with the thought that, however dreary the story, there will soon be another song along to liven things up. Deliver Me from Nowhere was the reverse experience – preferable when the protagonist was interacting with other characters rather than performing his songs, either in the process of their creation or in performance. Cooper’s approach is implicitly rather than explicitly hagiographic: the mood is downbeat, rather than celebratory (a mood reinforced by DP Masanobu Takayanagi’s dark-toned visuals). I was getting so little from the film that I thought about walking out but stayed in my seat. To call it a day seemed discourteous to the capable cast.
I’m so ignorant about Springsteen that I had no idea whether Jeremy Allen White (best known for The Bear) was doing his own singing – I gather that he was, with Springsteen’s own voice sometimes heard when background music is playing. White’s characterisation isn’t greatly varied but his performance is doggedly committed. As Jon Landau, Springsteen’s manager and producer, Jeremy Strong at first gives the impression of doing an impression, though he cuts through emotionally later on. Odessa Young is good as Springsteen’s long-suffering girlfriend, Faye Romano (a fictional composite of several women he dated at the time). Stephen Graham plays Bruce’s father: the American accent is a bit awkward, but Graham creates a characteristically touching portrait of a man who suffered mental ill health throughout his life. A moment near the end of the film, when the father persuades his thirty-something son to sit on his knee, is confounding and affecting. At least in his later appearances in the story, Graham wears padding to increase his bulk. It’s remarkable how completely his body seems to absorb the padding.
30 October 2025
