To say Deliver Me From Nowhere isn’t for everybody is to exaggerate its actual appeal. The Bruce Springsteen biopic isn't even for all Springsteen fans. But aging dudes with daddy issues, which could be a redundancy: have I got an admirably boring portrait of the mega-artist as a younger man for you! And me!
Deliver Me is adapted from Warren Zanes's 2023 nonfiction bestseller about the recording of Nebraska. The movie opens in 1981, as Springsteen, played by Jeremy Allen White, is onstage in Cincinnati with the E Street Band. He's finishing up The River tour, the 11-month, 140-show journey that hit 13 countries and made him a global superstar. The movie seeks to show how fame and Freudian foibles almost crushed him.
Cinematic portrayals of real modern rockers sometimes suffer from comparisons to the real thing. For example, all the buzz I heard about Bohemian Rhapsody, the 2018 feature film about Queen, was how filmmakers really nailed the band’s Live Aid set. But I'd already seen lots of video of Queen's 1985 Wembley performance before the movie came out. I didn't find Bohemian Rhapsody's replication nearly as thrilling. Obviously, anybody hankering for vintage Springsteen performances can find more than they can watch on YouTube.
Writer and director Scott Cooper avoids that obstacle by making Deliver Me more of a psychodrama than a rockumentary. Springsteen’s own music is a teeny part of the movie. Sure, you get great big helpings of classics like Sam Cooke’s "The Last Mile of the Way" and “Boom Boom” by John Lee Hooker. But the E Street Band shows up only briefly in the opening scene, and again while recording the title track to Born In The USA, and that's about it. The solo Nebraska tunes generally come in quick snippets. "Atlantic City" cuts off only 10 seconds in, just after you learn they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night.
Cooper's focus is all on where Springsteen's head was coming off that world tour. And that’s a real fucked up place. His career to that point had already brought him about as much adoration and critical huzzahs as anybody who ever plugged in a Telecaster, but no happiness. He surely knows tens of millions of fans love him. But he’s not sure if his dad likes him, and vice versa.
He rents a big house by a pond in the middle of nowhere, furnished with little more than a TV, boom box, guitar, and cassette recorder. He’s almost always alone, in bed or some other dark room. All he watches on TV is Badlands, a stark as hell and brilliant 1973 movie starring Martin Sheen as a Midwestern spree killer, and plays intentionally aggravating proto-industrial duo Suicide in heavy rotation on his boombox.
He only comes out at night to go to the Stone Pony, a real Asbury Park club where the real Springsteen really did make cameos, to sit in with house bands and play party rock. (The club scenes capture how much damn fun a packed club with a good cover band could be in the ‘80s. That’s largely a bygone entertainment option, with cover bands replaced by tribute acts or DJs.) He rarely talks, mumbles when he does, and smiles less.
While hiding out and taking in depressing art on his crazy man's Walden Pond, Springsteen decides he’s going to make an anti-hit record. He writes lots of downer songs with arrangements as spare as Woody Guthrie's, and records them on a cheap cassette deck. He calls his new record Nebraska because Martin Sheen’s Starkweatheresque killer is his main muse, and that’s where his killing fields were. He pledges he’ll do nothing to promote it once it comes out.
“No singles, no tour, no press, all right?” he tells his similarly smile-averse manager, Jon Landau (played by Jeremy Strong). “I don’t want to even be on the cover!” He knows it’ll piss off the label honchos, who want more "Hungry Heart"-esque hits and think the Born in the USA demos they've heard fit that bill. But he’s got to be true to his art, as Deliver Me tells us over and over again.
Plus, misery loves company, and this guy is miserable. Memories of his childhood fuel his depression. There are frequent flashbacks to 1957 in Freehold, N.J., and the home life that damaged him. The black-and-white clips show eight-year-old Springsteen (Matthew Anthony Pellicano Jr.) as a scared, skinny, silent runt. He lives in awe and fear of his father, played by Stephen Graham, who looks a lot like late-stage Babe Ruth. Mr. Springsteen is a mean, angry man, a verbal and physical abuser who routinely stays at the local tavern drinking and smoking 'til a family member retrieves him, then comes home to smoke and drink some more and beat his wife and threaten his kid. At one point he works up the courage to whack his dad in the back with a baseball bat to stop him from abusing his mom. All the flashbacks show that runty Bruce may not like his dad, but like all kids he wants to be loved by him. And the guy living alone by the lake still tortured by not knowing if he is. Nobody would switch lives with this Bruce Springsteen.
Nothing and nobody makes him happy. Not even Faye, the pretty diner waitress/single mother played by Odessa Young, who tells Springsteen after a cover band gig that she likes old time rock and roll—plus Patti Smith, Lou Reed, and him. And, boom boom, they’re an item and Bruce is going to amusement parks and holding hands with her and her little kid.
That relationship is the dumbest part of the movie. Bruce and Faye have a sex scene that’s rated Z for Zzzzzz. I bet White kept his Levi's on between the sheets during the shoot.
No, really! Because when this Springsteen blurts out, “I just want to get back to what happened in the bedroom!” to Landau, he’s not talking about more sexytime with Faye. He’s begging to return to his dark cabin to get back to recording more tunes about despair and spree killing and waiting at night for his dear old mean drunk dad to get home.
Faye never existed in the real world or Zanes's book; turns out her character was conjured by scriptwriters as an amalgam of all the ladies Bruce bedded by the lake. But the movie needed Faye because, like all celluloid diner waitresses, behind that server's apron, she's got wisdom. And she slings it like hash at Bruce when he dumps her in a diner booth, like we knew he was gonna; maybe Bon Jovi could come off the road and make it work with a single-mother diner waitress, but not Bruce! Faye tells him he’s Chock full o’ Nuts and he’ll never be happy with himself until he fixes his fucked up head.
By then, the lo-fi record's finished. Bruce gets in a muscle car and heads toward California, and sitting over his next plate of bacon and eggs at a diner counter somewhere around Lubbock, he accepts Faye was right to rip him a new one. His head really is fucked up. The last several minutes of the movie are spent resolving if Nebraska did well on the charts, and if Bruce Springsteen ever got professional help and got right with dad.
Spoilers alert: Yeah, yeah, yeah. On the night of his return to performing after his psychodramatic hiatus, Springsteen's dad waits for him in the arena dressing room. He wants his sweaty rock star kid to sit on his lap. “I’m 32 years old,” Bruce says. But he follows orders. And his dad tells him he’s really proud of him.
Back to me: The climactic scene, corny as it was, left me bawling. And jealous.
I was a massive Springsteen fan as a kid. He was huge on D.C.’s two free-form FM rock stations, WGTB and WHFS, and so I had his first two albums before Born to Run came out. I remember skipping class and sitting in the library at school in the fall of 1975 and reading the new Time and Newsweek issues with him on the cover and thinking how big he was about to become. Springsteen's management and legal problems kept him off the road and superstardom at bay for a few years. I finally got to see a Bruce show on August 15, 1978.
I had dad-related issues from that time, too. My father was a big, strong guy, and though he barely drank and didn't smoke or abuse any family members, I definitely lived in awe and fear of him. And we weren’t getting along great in those days. I was a self-destructive and destructive teenager, and word of my serial foolishness got back to him often enough to cause problems between us. At the beginning of that summer, after more than a year of being treated for back trouble, doctors told my father that his pain actually had been coming from previously undiagnosed lung cancer that had spread to his spine. He was given three months to live, but chose to go through cruel chemo and radiation regimens to buy a couple more. Before my eyes he quickly went from a guy who stood 6-foot-5 and weighed 220 pounds to being unable to stand. He was all skin and bones. I avoided being at home as much as I could.
Rock as refuge from angst is a trite descriptor, but hell if it doesn’t fit that Springsteen show. I remember the day of the concert as well as I remember any day of my childhood. The show was on the first day of practice in pads for high school football two-a-days and it was hot as hell. My buddy Louie Paradise picked me up after practice and he already had my neighbor Debbie (who is still his wife) and my sister Anne, and a cooler of beer in his car, and we were off to the Capital Centre to finally see our hero. The show was a marathon and incredible. (Some evidence here.) I do not recall talking to my father that day.
The rest of the world didn't go away. Pretty soon I was having what turned out to be my last conversation with my dad. He told me he was worried about me and that I had to change and grow up. I knew he was right, but I was a teenager. He didn't live long enough to see any growing up.
I fell away as a Springsteen fan a few years later. But when I think about him, I often think about that 1978 show, and that summer and my dad. I sure did while watching the movie. Our father/son relationships were hardly identical–I was the problem drinker in my household, for one–but the Springsteen character’s flashbacks to childhood triggered a flood my own. My father still shows up in my dreams. He's always the big, strong, healthy Dad, before he got sick. And I'm usually letting him down in absurdly mundane ways; not keeping up on walks through a city is a recurring theme. So of course Deliver Me’s climactic father-son make up scene brought a flood of tears and envy. Hell, if my old ass got a chance to sit in my dad’s lap, I'd take it and tell him I wished I stayed home more when he was sick, and that I didn't mean to let him down.
The same day I saw the movie, out of the blue, Anne texted me a black-and-white photo of our father standing next to his VW beetle somewhere in New York, looking happy and real Irish. I'd never seen that picture before. She said the date on the back said November 1957. She didn’t know I’d just seen the Springsteen movie or that there even was a Springsteen movie, let alone that much of the movie takes place in black-and-white flashbacks to that same year. She said she sent it because she'd just found it. The whole thing was weird as hell. But, damn, it made me happy. It's a great photo.
