"I know who you are."
"That makes one of us."
That exchange between a star struck car salesman and Bruce Springsteen gets to the heart of writer/director Scott Cooper's music biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. Like most good biopics, Cooper's film narrows its focus to a specific chapter in its subject's life. In this case it's 1981 and Springsteen's writing and recording of 'Nebraska', considered by many as The Boss's greatest work.
Having scored his first major hit with the 1980 album 'The River' and its single 'Hungry Heart', Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) has just become a fully fledged superstar, but his record label wants to push him on to megastardom. Springsteen has other ideas. He wants to follow up 'The River' with an album of intimate, acoustic ballads, an anachronism in the post-disco, New Wave era of synths and big productions.
Much like how Springsteen defied commercial expectations to produce a raw work of intimacy, so too has Cooper delivered a low-key drama that eschews most of the expected plot beats of the music biopic. There's the cliché of childhood flashbacks (presented in black and white, no less) in which a young Bruce lives in fear of his mean drunk father (Stephen Graham), but otherwise this is a quiet drama that shuns the expected domestic quarrels and shouty arguments with record label execs.
Much of this comes down to how respected Springsteen is, both by the music industry and the residents of the New Jersey he returns to after concluding a major tour. As much as his foibles might frustrate them, everyone in Springsteen's sphere recognises that they're dealing with a major talent. In many scenes the loudest sound is the cracking of the egg shells people walk on in the singer/songwriter's presence. It's a movie set in a time when commerce had yet to fully become the enemy of expression, and this is exemplified in a scene where Columbia record exec Al Teller (David Krumholtz) first listens to 'Nebraska' and realises he has an album he's going to struggle to sell on his hands. We expect Teller to rant and rave, but instead he takes deep breaths and accepts that this is the pact he has made with this singer/songwriter, that the industry is there to support the artist, not vice versa.
Springsteen's personal life is represented in his doomed relationship with New Jersey waitress Faye Romano (Odessa Young). Initially Faye lusts after Springsteen the rock star only to fall in love with Bruce the man. The trouble is while she can separate the two, Springsteen can't. While Faye lacks the vocabulary to express how much she loves Bruce, he has too many words in his head to pick out the ones she needs to hear.
Springsteen was suffering from depression in this period, but it was a time when such an ailment wasn't taken seriously. He can't tell anyone how he's feeling, not even Faye, and so he channels this into his songwriting. The result is an album so dark in its themes that it worries those around him, none more so than his manager and producer Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong). The unspoken bond between Springsteen and Landau is perhaps the film's great romance, two men who need each other to achieve greatness. In one scene, a lost for words Landau puts on a Sam Cooke record and we watch as Springsteen's expression changes from a frown to a knowing smile. It feels like we're intruding on an intimate moment as the two men recall some shared memory that we're not made privy to. That the film is honest enough to admit that it's okay for a biopic not to know everything about its subject is one of its strengths.
More so than any other music biopic, Cooper's film is about the process of writing, recording and even cutting an album. Cooper's camera fetishises Springsteen's hand-written lyrics and is keen to highlight the lo-fi methods deployed in the creation of 'Nebraska', recorded in Springsteen's bedroom directly to a cassette on a four track recorder. Audiophiles will delight in the film's focus on Springsteen's frustration at being unable to transfer the rawness of his demo cassette into a bells and whistles studio setting. With an antique record cutting lathe dusted down to achieve just the right sound on vinyl, it's the latest in a growing list of recent films in which outdated technology is required for a protagonist to achieve their goals (see also Top Gun: Maverick, Nope and Relay).
Where the film flounders is in Springsteen's relationship with his father. The flashbacks are such an obvious inclusion that they jar with the film's general commitment to avoiding clichés. Graham is given little to do in the flashbacks other than look mean, and when playing the elderly 1981 version of the character he struggles to emote through heavy make-up that gives him the appearance of some monstrous caricature from a Mike Myers comedy.
Otherwise this is a film distinguished by standout performances. As the people in Springsteen's shadow, Young and Strong are quietly excellent. While he may not physically resemble The Boss, White has nailed Springsteen's gait, his lazy eyes and overactive chin. When he first appears on screen all we see is Jeremy Allen White, but by the end we're in no doubt that we're watching Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen.
Directed by: Scott Cooper
Starring: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham, Odessa Young, Gaby Hoffmann, Marc Maron, David Krumholtz
