‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’: the out-of-tune echo of pain in a brilliant sound postcard about the creation of ‘Nebraska’, by The Boss | Cinema: premieres and reviews

In Everything that ascends must converge, one of Flannery O’Connor’s abundant stories that show characters dangerously rooted in confusion, alienation and despondency, the American writer summarizes the mental boredom of one of them like this: “He never spoke of the house without contempt, and he never thought of it without desire.” In My Father’s House, song from the album Nebraska, on whose creation the film hinges Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, The New Jersey singer cries: “My father’s house shines bright and strong / stands like a beacon calling to me in the night (…). Shining across this dark highway / where our sins lie unexpiated.”

O’Connor’s influence on his songs, of that sense of desperation and isolation, has been admitted by the Boss more than once, and it is one of the artistic incentives that surround a film of unequal quality about the origin of pain and its influence on the creative process, which is completed with a resounding cinephile base: bad lands, by Terrence Malick, so essential to the subject Nebraska; The night of the hunter by Charles Laughton, and its parallels with children persecuted by adult brutality. Even Paul Schrader, who wanted Springsteen as an actor back in the eighties, parades through the story scripted and directed by Scott Cooper, based on the book that the writer and musician Warren Zanes published in 2023 about the creation of the legendary album Nebraska.

In Cooper’s script, and this is the main downfall, there is something strange and dramatically debatable. From the beginning, viewers know everything about the character’s interior and the reasons for his discouragement, detailed through numerous flashbacks in black and white with the protagonist being a seven-year-old boy, and treated with bitter crudeness and violence by his alcoholic father (played by Stephen Graham).

However, the other main characters (Jon Landau, his manager and music producer; the girl with whom he is in a relationship, his friends…), who obviously do not see these flashbacks, They wonder what the hell is behind that darkness, that behavior, that bitterness.

The contrast between both pieces of information is harsh with the film, which, in an even worse touch of dramatic construction, goes so far as to use a role that appears on screen only to listen (that of Landau’s wife, played by Grace Gummer, daughter of Meryl Streep), who does not (almost) even utter a word, and who is only in the script for her husband’s character to tell her how despondent Bruce is and that he cannot know why, while the audience wonders what all this talk is about.

It is evident that the film lacks mystery. Regarding Springsteen’s depression and his stormy past, and the conjunction of images and texts, everything is too chewed up, verbalized and even repetitive. On the other hand, and here come the reasons to approach this conventional and crude film in its narration, but at times brilliant in its forms, the creative process of its songs, the composition of the lyrics, the recording with the simplest devices to show the nudity and truth of the themes of Nebraska, and the impression in the studio of some of what would be his later successes, with Born in the USA at the head, forms the true core of the work of Cooper, a director and screenwriter not too well known, but with an interesting previous filmography, filled with American roots in all its extension. Thus, the country of rebel heart (2009), the western Hostiles (2017), and the thriller 19th century The crimes of the academy, with West Point and Edgar Allan Poe as protagonists, they fit perfectly with Springsteen’s American town rock.

Jeremy Allen White, who provides his voice to the songs, is as formidable as in The Bear, although it could very well be the same role, but without screams. And, of course, there remain the luxury of the songs, the director’s respect for the harshness of the sound, and Masanobu Takayanagi’s dazzling photography of the present, with contrasting colors. But Scott’s visual solidity is torn between revelation and darkness, between the need to tell the origin of the pain and the clumsiness of underlining it. And in the end, as the title suggests, Deliver Me From Nowhere He begs for redemption, but only achieves correction.