From 20th Century Studios, “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” chronicles the making of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 “Nebraska” album when he was a young musician on the cusp of global superstardom, struggling to reconcile the pressures of success with the ghosts of his past.
Recorded on a 4-track recorder in Springsteen’s New Jersey bedroom, the album marked a pivotal time in his life and is considered one of his most enduring works—a raw, haunted acoustic record populated by lost souls searching for a reason to believe.
With Jeremy Allen White staring and singing just like The Boss, “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” is based on the book Deliver Me from Nowhere by Warren Zanes. The film is written and directed by Scott Cooper and also stars Jeremy Strong (Jon Landau) and Stephen Graham (Doug Springsteen).
According to Scott Cooper, also the writer-director of the Academy Award-winning film “Crazy Heart,” “at its core, it’s the story of a neglected soul repairing himself through music. Bruce was coming off the enormous success of ‘The River,’ and from the outside, it looked like everything was going right. But inside, he was quietly unraveling, experiencing a kind of emotional vertigo—the feeling that the life he’d built no longer matched the weight he was carrying. Bruce was also haunted—not in a gothic sense, but spiritually. Haunted by his father. Haunted by the fear of success, of no longer being like the people he grew up with in Freehold. Out of that haunted state came, in my view, one of the greatest records of the last 50 years. ‘Nebraska’ wasn’t planned. Bruce didn’t walk into that room to make a record. He walked in because something deep inside was clawing to get out.”
“Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” gets ★★★★ ½
