Henry O'Brien
It’s a tired statement to say that the musician biopic is a tired genre. Hollywood is obsessed with telling the stories of the singers and songwriters who make pop music what it is today. Increasingly, the legendary rockers themselves want to take part in these projects, with Elton John receiving an executive producer credit on his biopic, Rocketman, as a prime example. This leads to fewer examinations of the artists and their impact and more bland self-mythologizing.
But there is a possible, minor shift in how filmmakers tell these artists’ lives, and it started with James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. The Timothée Chalamet-led film shows Bob Dylan’s early days of fame, focusing on four years in the 1960s, instead of fully depicting his entire life story. The film doesn’t aspire to be the definitive Bob Dylan biopic, but it finds the time of his life that is most significant.
The latest example of this phenomenon comes from New Jersey’s native son, Bruce Springsteen. His biopic, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, which stars Jeremy Allen White and is based on Warren Zanes’ book of the same name, doesn’t tell the whole story of The Boss. Rather, it is a raw and brief account of Springsteen’s process in writing, recording and producing his legendary 1982 album Nebraska, all the while suffering from a debilitating mental health crisis.
It’s a credit to director Scott Cooper for not fully singing Springsteen’s praises, truly revealing the pain in this part of the singer’s life. But the movie never gets past the simple message of “mental health matters,” and the tension and heartbreak coming from the act of creation never elevate into something distinct and unique. The film never reaches the profundity and impact of an album that captured the emotions and power of Terrence Malick’s Badlands and of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. Instead, it’s just contrived Hollywood storytelling that falls woefully short of the distinct art it is indebted to.
Cooper smartly places Springsteen right before his fame fully explodes; some regular folks know who he is, but he isn’t a superstar just yet. With this, the movie works best as less of a portrait of an artist and more of a detective story. After watching Badlands one night, Springsteen feels a burst of inspiration and heads to a local library to find out the real story from the Malick film. Watching Bruce painstakingly research, write and re-write the lyrics to the song Nebraska is invigorating and speaks to the larger truth of creating a piece of art. Namely, it’s really challenging and it takes time.
These scenes actually do a better job of explicating the feelings an artist has when he’s in the middle of trying to interpret his feelings into music. Where Cooper’s film veers off into the lane of cliched hackiness is when Bruce shares scenes with love interest Faye Romano (Odessa Young) and black-and-white scenes with his father and mother (Stephen Graham, Gaby Hoffmann). With such clear ties to the pain Bruce feels, there’s little to explore; the feelings of trauma are ill-defined and the movie wants to take credit for referring to trauma while actually never examining it.
But what makes the film a struggle comes from the scenes where White tries to display the internal agony of Springsteen. Similar to The Bear, the show that made White a star, he competently portrays external pain, but never adequately hints at internal pain. It’s what makes The Bear an emotionally stifled show in my eyes.
The only actor worth praise in this picture is Jeremy Strong, an ever-reliable screen presence, as Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau. Strong doesn’t have much to do besides singing Bruce’s praises, but he still does enough to be the compelling actor that he is.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere emphasizes how outside the box Springsteen was in developing Nebraska. Springsteen refused to do tours or press for the album and none of the songs on the album were singles. But Cooper’s attempt at portraying Springsteen’s struggle is so inside the box in its mode and form that it’s an active insult to the Boss’s creative process. The movie feels so manufactured to portray anxiety and depression that it actually simplifies those feelings, making the whole work feel like a run-of-the-mill album is all surface. And to do that with Nebraska makes the flaws far overshadow any positives.
