Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

Bruce Springsteen is a superstar. With five albums under his belt with the E Street Band, his first top 10 single in "Hungry Heart", and a hugely successful tour for album "The River", he's on the brink of global megastardom. The press, the public and his record label are hungry for more.

Bruce Springsteen is a mess. Haunted by memories of his childhood poverty and his violent alcoholic father, he repeatedly finds himself parked outside the now-empty Freehold NJ house where he grew up. He has had a string of girlfriends, but can't bring himself to commit to a relationship. In an isolated lakeside house in Colt's Neck, he records demos on an early four-track. He finds himself obsessed with spree killer Charles Starkweather who killed 11 people in Nebraska, and writes about people disconnected from society, from family, from community. The songs are deeply personal, stripped down... and entirely uncommercial.

This is the setting for the film "Deliver Me From Nowhere". Rather than your standard rock biopic, a greatest hits jukebox charting an artist or band's career from start to the present, this is a focused character piece about a man on the brink of despair, nearly lost to depression, trying to find meaning in the noise all around him. There are few hit songs in this film. We get a small piece of "Born To Run" performed at the end of his tour, and we hear the E Street Band working on an early version of what will eventually become "Born In The USA". But mostly we have the echoey acoustic guitar, harmonica and semi-mumbled vocals of "Nebraska".

We focus on his inner turmoil, how he fails to cope with a fling that's turning serious and putting him into a parental role, while still managing to play in Asbury Park at the Stone Pony club, where performing on stage serves as a distraction from his reality. We focus on his relationship with his father, mostly in the form of flashbacks. Matthew Anthony Pellicano Jr who plays Bruce as a child is incredible, the black and white film turning his eyes into black pits as he warily interacts with his drunken father, played brilliantly by Stephen Graham. And the adult Springsteen is captured by Jeremy Allen White in an amazing performance. The acting, direction and cinematography is all top-notch. It's a joy to watch the film, despite its heavy subject matter.

( But... )

One of the things that confuses me about this film is who it's for, other than cosmolinguist. It's been getting huge amounts of promotion, from bus adverts to the stars appearing on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show, most of whose listeners are far too young to have heard of Bruce Springsteen. And this film isn't a great introduction to Springsteen as a person, or his music - "Nebraska" is now considered a great work, but it was "Born in the USA", the album after it, which propelled him to stardom. Jeremy Allen White said that the only way he could make the film was to portray a rock star struggling with depression and recording a bleak album who just happened to be Bruce Springsteen. And on that basis they did a great job, but I expect that sort of film to be a smaller indie release. I'll be interested to see how the box office numbers work out for this, because I expect it to be a critically acclaimed financial bomb. In this way the movie seems to mirror the album itself, and I'm really hoping that nobody claims this is a deliberate irony...

(I was also slightly sad that there wasn't a post-credits scene where Timothée Chalamet's Bob Dylan is waiting for Bruce in a hotel room to recruit him to the Dad Rock Avengers.)