Springsteen – Deliver Me From Nothing – Film (2025)

1981. Bruce Springsteen is fresh from the success of the River Tour which made him famous far beyond his native New Jersey, and his record company immediately wants a new LP to “strike while the iron is hot”. But he is in the midst of a crisis, partly due to the sense of guilt in moving away from his origins and leaving behind that proletarian world of diners, pinball machines and suburban houses, partly due to the conflicting relationship with a father who raised his elbow and fought.

Everywhere he is followed by the dark shadow that is at his heels and that void from which he is unable to free himself except when, in a room of his modest apartment, he composes the songs that will be part of his least known and most respected LP – Nebraska – far from what the record company expects. Bruce will want them mastered exactly as he recorded them on an audiocassette (without a case), and he won’t want to do tours, singles or interviews: not even put his face on the cover.

Springsteen – Free me from nothing chooses a particular moment in the Boss’ life and career to tell the loss of identity of a man and an artist who has always had as his priority not to betray himself.

Assisting him is the manager and record producer Jon Landau who, while understanding the needs of the film company, believes in Springsteen’s artistic honesty. And Bruce, at 32 years old, remains fiercely attached to his truth and seeks his path, even if he is burdened by that form of depression that will accompany him throughout his life, and which has its roots in his tormented childhood.

Jeremy Allen White (performer of all the songs on stage) immerses himself in Springsteen’s torment, also conveying that of Carmy Berzatto from the series The Bear and Lip Gallagher’s Shamelessliterally transforming himself into the Boss in the concert scenes where he reproduces his gestures and tight grimaces, while in the more intimate ones he avoids imitating the singer-songwriter, concentrating on baring his soul. Jeremy Strong is terrific in the role of Jon Landau, and one wishes the film would have stayed longer on the relationship between the two men, as well as the chemistry between the two actors. The same goes for White and Stephen Graham, the actor who plays Bruce’s father.

The tension of the plot is instead diluted in the scenes that illustrate the sentimental story with Faye, a single mother and waitress from New Jersey to whom Bruce is unable to promise a future, which appear superfluous because the dramaturgical arc clearly concerns the artistic identity of the protagonist, rather than his emotional availability to embark on a relationship: in fact, the scenes that retrace the creation of some of the songs on the album are much more engaging Nebraska.

Director Scott Cooper wisely avoids hagiography and manages the alternation between art and life well, making his film a folk ballad about a performer who has always embodied a very specific part of the American identity: the disinherited, blue collar, outspoken and genuine one. His Bruce corresponds to the melancholic sound of his harmonica and to that crooked walk that smells of loneliness, he fights with the ghost of Evil that creeps into the homes of respectable people and that demolishes every certainty.

“The wrong things seem right to me”, Springsteen will tell the record companies who would like clean and easily reproducible performances, when for him the slow pace, the distortions, the echo that seems to come from the depths of his soul are sacred and must be protected at all costs. Paradoxically, the genesis of Nebraska from rock to a sort of acoustic folk is mirrored and contrary to Bob Dylan’s transition from folk to electric rock described in the recent A Complete Unknown: the Boss returns to his roots, to the ghost of Tom Joad, temporarily moving away from the hardcore rock that will characterize Born to Run, which from Cooper’s film we discover was born in the same years as Nebraska, and which will become the breakthrough single of the following LP, the one post existential crisis.

Just as in Nebraska Springsteen strips his compositions of any useless frills and lets his heart breathe, in Springsteen – Free me from nothing Cooper extrapolates the Boss from his iconolatry and returns him to an analog hero and champion of imperfections. His album will speak to anyone looking for identity and belonging, communicating a sense and direction that is never predictable.
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