“Deliver me from nothing” dark and incomplete film

– In the film about Bruce Springsteen, director and screenwriter Scott Cooper tries to avoid all the clichés of the genre, but in the end he is unable to free himself from the format, and neglects important themes, such as the social vision of the Boss

– Jeremy Allen White disappoints: his imitation of the rocker’s hoarse accent makes him exhausted and exhausted from the first bars. Many gaps in the story. The most authentic character in the film is the rocker’s hypothetical girlfriend

The life of music stars has become a favorite playground for directors. From Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) about Freddie Mercury and Rocketman (2019) about Elton John, music biopics seem to be a constant trend. Although they often disappoint, mostly because they are more a collection of clichés than a genre: the troubled childhood, the talented dreamer, the incredulous record executive, the banal stories behind the hits, the rise, the fall, the detox, the depression, the getting the girl and a message before the credits that summarizes the album’s sales. It’s such a well-defined lineup that the definitive bio-parody, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Storyprecede Bohemian Rhapsody for over a decade.

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere attempts to free itself from the format, limiting itself to a crucial fragment of Bruce Springsteen’s life. In his preface, he recalls another recent bio-pic of a famous artist, New wave by Richard Linklater. Both focus on the protagonist’s creation of a work, respectively Springsteen’s 1982 album, Nebraskaand Jean-Loc Godard’s film from 1960, Until my last breath. But while Linklater is harsh on the stubborn irascibility that Godard employed to make his first feature film, Cooper focuses on the more intimate and introverted aspects of the musician’s story, while remaining on the surface. Springsteen it sounds like an advert for what was, intentionally, the least commercial of the Boss’ albums. This is even more disconcerting because the elements of the story – depression, love, artistic exploration, deep-rooted family trauma, professional pressures – are serious, complex and dramatic.

The story begins at the end of 1981, when, after the tour of The River and his first Top 10 single, Springsteen retreated to a New Jersey farm and recorded an intimate acoustic demo of songs that vibrated with violence and disenchantment. The singer intended it only as a starting point for another album with the E Street Band, but soon realized that re-recording or enriching the songs only detracted from them, and eventually released the lo-fi demos under the title Nebraskaa folk dirge for America.

The album, surprisingly, became a hit, but it didn’t bring Springsteen the relief he needed from depression. Like many of the heroes of his songs, he set out on a journey, but darkness accompanied him, prompting him to seek out a mental health professional.

The story seems tailor-made for a film: a tale of artistic integrity mixed with the struggles of a sensitive man whose demons are not the trappings of fame, but an uncontrollable sadness inherited from his father. There are also great hits for casual fans: Born in the U.S.A. was born from the demo and was recorded in early ’82 before being shelved until Springsteen could get rid of Nebraska.

This very narrow focus ends up weakening the story: limiting itself to Nebraskathe film fails to capture what made that album such a radical turning point. The legendary Springsteen, the quintessential American rock star, is implied but never seen. When the film opens with the closing night of the tour of The RiverJeremy Allen White’s Springsteen is already a tense spring: his imitation of the Boss’ hoarse accent makes him exhausted and exhausted from the first bars. Within a few minutes he is already on his farm staring plaintively into space. The isolation doesn’t seem out of place because it’s the only version of the character we’re presented with.

Springsteen’s music receives similar treatment. The disturbing and unfinished style of Nebraska it was a stark contrast to the perfectionist, band-like sound that Springsteen had doggedly pursued since Born To Run and which he had finally perfected in The River. But also in the only concert scene of Free me from nothingthe audio mixing clearly favors White’s voice and the audience, reducing the E Street Band to a footnote. When Dylan went electric in James Mangold’s biopic A Complete Unknownat least we knew what it sounded like acoustically.

Director and screenwriter Scott Cooper draws visual inspiration from Nebraskacapturing flashbacks to Springsteen’s childhood in black and white, and the film is presented in a warm but limited color palette that, combined with the costumes, is more reminiscent of the mid-’70s than the early ’80s. The photography is loose, no frills: conversations are often captured in long takes, but the camera never draws attention to itself. White plays Springsteen as a man who can’t express or even understand his emotions without a guitar to hide behind, but his performance comes into direct conflict with an overwritten script peppered with emotional statements.

Cooper takes it for granted that his audience knows Springsteen well and fails to clearly establish the abyss in which the star’s career found itself. The casual viewer may be pleasantly surprised to discover Springsteen’s depths, but will struggle to identify exactly when the film takes place. The details Cooper focuses on are almost fetishistically specific: the orange shag carpet from Springsteen’s farmhouse, the exact model of tape recorder he used (TEAC 144), the Echoplex effect he applied to the demo to imitate Elvis’ early records.

In showing the precise process and inspirations behind the songs, Cooper strips them of any ambiguity: he matches scenes of Badlands by Terrence Malick to Springsteen’s childhood, prompting Bruce to rewrite the album’s title track in the first person, with no uncertainty about who he sees in the violent story. When asked if the title track has a name, Springsteen croaks, “I wish I’d called it Starkweather…but now I’m thinking about Nebraska».

Springsteen’s troubled childhood is woven into the film and is creatively channeled into mundane stories behind the songs. Mansion on the Hill is the worst, where the lyrics of the song are captured bar by bar, forcing the film to admit that Springsteen has a sister who is never seen.

Amid this journey through clichés, the heart of the film is entirely fictional: a love story between Springsteen and a single mother from New Jersey who represents everything he has run to and escaped from. Faye (Odessa Young) lives the American life Springsteen sings about – paycheck to paycheck, finding solace in rock’n’roll – so it’s ironic that, thanks to the actress’s magnetic performance, she’s the film’s most authentic character. With her blue eyeshadow and red leather jacket, Faye is the only person who truly lives in Reagan’s America, but she exists to be left behind, a mix of all the other girls Springsteen sent away.

The film’s resolution rests instead on Springsteen’s father, Douglas, whose harsh parenting and mental illness haunt Bruce. Stephen Graham is a menacing figure in flashbacks precisely because his violence is ambiguous and unpredictable, but in the film’s present he becomes numb and vague, stripped of his power by time and alcohol.

What Cooper avoids is what Nebraska both: it is also, and perhaps above all, a political album. His songs are full of workers suffering harsh treatment: they lose their jobs, they lose a house mortgaged by a bank, they are in debt, they agree to work for a gangster, they bear the brunt of a boss’s disapproval, they are broke and turn to crime, they try to live with the trauma of military service in the Vietnam War. The album doesn’t just tell a story of losing faith in the American dream; provides a retrospective disproof of the idea that that so-called dream was ever anything more.

In the film, Bruce says he likes the sound of the demo “from the past or something.” Far from looking nostalgically to the fifties, however, Nebraska suggests that, in the lives of American workers, there has always been violence and trauma lurking placidly repressed, and that the pressures and burdens he and the country were bearing at the time come from the past. Cooper’s film certainly doesn’t make Bruce’s childhood happy, but by limiting Bruce’s retrospective sadness to the personal sphere, it ignores the singer-songwriter’s broader social vision. The film lacks the courage of convictions of the real Springsteen.