Deliver Me From Nothing Review: A Flawed Biopic About the Boss Behind the Music

At the cinema it is a flourishing period for musical biopics. We see more and more these portraits of musicians in specific moments of their lives, dealing with revolutionary moments in the history of music or with records that redefined their careers. Now it’s the big screen’s turn Jeremy Allen Whitewhich after its definitive consecration in the series The Beartakes on the role of the Boss, Bruce Springsteen in Springsteen Directed and Written by Scoot Cooper. In this biopic Jeremy Allen White is the face of a Boss in a particular moment of his career (and his life), in which he decided to silence the sound of the electric guitar, to give voice to the emotions and traumas that reveal a complex figure.

Springsteen – Free me from nothing chooses an atypical approach for the genre, as if wanting to immediately shake up this category of films, with the fear that it may have already exhausted its flame. It does so by framing a specific period in the singer’s life, describing the writing phase of Nebraskaamong the Boss’s most appreciated albums shortly before definitively exploding with the iconic Born In The U.S.A.

The Boss behind the music

1981. Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) has just successfully concluded the River Tourbut his record company wants to strike while the iron is hot. Springsteen is in crisis: he suffers because he feels he is moving away from New Jersey and his origins, but at the same time he would like to forget the turbulent relationship with his alcoholic father (Stephen Graham). One day that unresolved trauma slowly begins to take shape Nebraskathe folkiest and least “Springsteen” album of his career. While the record company is disconcerted by this drift, the Boss finds the support of his manager, friend and confidant, Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong). In the meantime, you can watch the trailer for Springsteen – Deliver me from nothing here.

Deliver Me From Nothing is an atypical musical biopic because it’s not very musical. He chooses to investigate the psyche of a man tormented by the first symptoms of depression and constantly searching for a balance between his private life and his career, which is now well underway and on the verge of exploding. This is ultimately the story of the film: a man struggling with depression. Cooper’s approach is honorable do without hagiography to expose a figure so well known for the American identity (like never before, if not with the album itself Nebraska). The film’s music is Bruce Springsteen’s torment.

Jeremy Allen Whiteafter Lip Gallagher’s Shameless and Carmy Berzatto of The Bearknows something about traumas and torments, and in fact this incarnation is very successful for him. The fact that he does not seek imitation or reverence in gestures is appreciable, except when he reproduces them in the singing scenes where intimacy leaves room for an almost literal transformation of the actor into the singer: the voice we hear is White’s, really crazy.

A story made of people

Springsteen is laid bare in a story that is very much linked to the character rather than to the music itself. In this perhaps Cooper’s film is unable to find its best expressive form, but its actors save the film. Jeremy Strong as the singer’s manager, Jon Landau, is terrific: He also shows that he knows how to act – later Succession there was no doubt – and that he was comfortable in the role of this mentor and shaper figure (just as Trump had been in the role of lawyer Roy Cohn in The Apprentice – The origins of Trumpcertainly poles apart from this other role).

The scenes between the two are very intense and deep, and demonstrate great chemistry – which we can’t wait to see again The Social Reckoningthe sequel to The Social Network) – which at the same time leaves us with a bad taste in our mouth because we would have liked the film to focus much more on the two of them and, paradoxically, on them in relation to the writing of Nebraska.

An imperfect biopic

Scoot Cooper instead he continues to follow the character and hesitates a bit when he dramatizes Bruce’s relationship with his father or with Faye (Odessa Young), a young mother with whom the singer embarks on a brief relationship. Here the director falls into the clichés typical of these biopics, by the abused flashback in bianco e nero to frame the image of the past, to non-existent female characters – or caricatures, when they appear on the screen. Especially the scenes with Faye would like to dilute the dramatic component, but they succeed superfluous and forced. On the other side, Stephen Graham he gives an excellent performance as the Boss’ father, even giving us a gift lots of emotions especially at the end.

The alternation between life and art doesn’t always come out in the best way Springsteen – Free me from nothing: a biopic on a melancholic folk ballad that takes care of framing the person while leaving the music out. Imperfect in form, scholastic in contentstill manages to photograph (thanks to its protagonist) an equally imperfect man.