This article appeared in the October 10, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (Scott Cooper, 2025)

“I wanna spit in the face of these Badlands,” Bruce Springsteen snarls from an Arizona stage in November 1980, hurling out the words as if they’d been stuck in his guts. The show, held just one day after Ronald Reagan’s landslide presidential-election victory, was an early stop on Bruce’s grueling yearlong tour for his double album The River—an era in which his marathon concerts with the E Street Band began to approach the scope of classical operas, with runtimes pushing past four hours and set lists ballooning toward 40 songs. In the expanding space of these rock ’n’ roll arias, Bruce worked ecstatic rave-ups out of early-career hits like “Rosalita” and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” but he also crafted stadium-rock spectacles out of stark, unrelenting songs that exposed a rotten core at the center of the American Dream. That night in Tempe, a plaintive harmonica leaves its scars on the song that gave the album (and the tour) its name, “The River”; an ominous organ drone and snare-drum thump drives “Factory,” a song dedicated to his father, Douglas “Dutch” Springsteen, who, the singer confides, was never afforded anything beyond “the work, the working, just the working life.” A pumped-up vision, as its lyrics pronounce, of “trouble in the heartland,” “Badlands” was one of these darker songs, too. On stage in Arizona, he performs it with such turbocharged rage that it feels like he’s spitting right in Reagan’s eyes.

A similar scene depicting Bruce going full Boss Mode kicks off Scott Cooper’s new movie Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, the Spotlight Gala selection of this year’s New York Film Festival. We begin on the River Tour, but with its closing show in Cincinnati, in September ’81, and Jeremy Allen White has been swapped in for Bruce. While there’s an admittedly strange physical disconnect (it essentially just looks like noted actor Jeremy Allen White hopped on stage and randomly started doing a pretty good Bruce Springsteen impersonation), he really does nail that very Bruce kind of peacocking—the craning and pinching of the chin, the head tilting skyward, the stance just wide enough to suggest that particular broad-legged strut.

But the first clue that something’s not quite right lies not so much in what the scene has going for it as in what it leaves out. Where the Arizona Bruce of “Badlands” appears almost like a religious fanatic, channeling the electric interplay with his bandmates and possessed by belief in the cleansing power of the song itself, the Cincinnati Bruce of Deliver Me from Nowhere mugs his way through a note-perfect, pretty-much-fine version of “Born to Run,” a song that by 1981 was already six years old. Cooper and DP Masanobu Takayanagi’s camera can’t seem to trust in the charisma of their chosen performer, repeatedly and stalely crosscutting between a glibly adoring sea of waving hands in the audience and an increasingly sweaty and animated White on stage—an apparent attempt at bestowing a starlike sheen on the laboring contours of his face. As the song hurtles to its predictable conclusion—the crowd going wild in adulation; a smash cut to a wearied Bruce alone backstage, head in hands—we start to sense that a certain kind of narrative is being foisted on us, an all-too-familiar one about the highs and lows of life in the limelight. But at what cost? What about that guy on stage in Arizona, who seemed to wield his political fury and musical commitment so deftly, so undeniably?

The rock biopic, particularly a recent slew devoted to icons like Freddie Mercury (Bryan Singer and Dexter Fletcher’s Bohemian Rhapsody), Bob Dylan (James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown), and Elvis (Baz Luhrmann’s… umm… Elvis), is always built around an imitation. Now it comes for the Boss. In these films, the mimetic powers of an actor can go only so far before bumping up against the still-enduring sounds and images of their celebrity muse. As we watch, it constantly seems to put us in a shifting, sometimes judgmental, sometimes uncanny position. Despite our noblest efforts at suspending disbelief, we get sucked into a game of assessment, ranking the convincingness of this or that impersonation as if we were judges on American Idol.

As the two latest entries into the fray, the Springsteen and Dylan films are doubly complicated by the fact that their subjects are still very much here with us—these aren’t characters who can be “brought back to life” in the way that Austin Butler and Rami Malek attempt to resurrect the mythic Elvis with his sideburns and Mercury with his mustache. Instead, both films present themselves on much more modest terms, as the kind of relationship-focused chamber dramas and mid-century period pieces—perhaps typified by works like Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It (1992) and Nancy Savoca’s Dogfight (1991)—that used to be a staple of mainstream and independent American cinema. Great care is lavished on historically evocative production design, and the essential stakes of each narrative revolves around making our genius but enigmatic main man somehow complicated by setting him up with an all-too-human and grounded love interest. But as much as these two films would like to think of themselves as craftsmanlike throwbacks, they’re also impossible not to view in the contemporary context of the ever-churning IP mill of franchises, reboots, and cinematic universes, where bite-size spin-offs and “origin stories” leave ample room for future chances to cash in on the same products. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that both Springsteen and Dylan recently sold the publishing rights to their entire catalogues to megalith media corporations—Sony and Universal, respectively—for multi–hundred million dollar price tags.

Still, there’s some wisdom in Cooper’s choice to adopt a similar frame to A Complete Unknown, narrowing the parameters to a specific inflection point in his subject’s life and career. In last year’s biopic, it was Dylan’s early years in Greenwich Village up to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he famously “went electric.” Here, it’s the making of the Nebraska album, Springsteen’s spectral 1982 masterpiece, famously recorded on a finicky four-track cassette machine in a shag-carpeted bedroom in Colts Neck, New Jersey. In the movie’s telling, Bruce returns hollowed out from The River tour and throws himself into depressed but productive isolation, venturing outside of his rented house on the reservoir only to stare mournfully at his nearby dilapidated childhood home or rip guitar solos with a hard-rocking blues band at his old stomping grounds, The Stone Pony. There, he meets Faye (Odessa Young), the younger sister of some guy from high school, and the pair strike up a tender but increasingly emotionally fraught romance. A chance late-night TV viewing of Terence Malick’s Badlands (1973) sends him on a songwriting streak, producing everything from surefire hits like “Born in the USA” and “I’m on Fire” to the desolate, austere tales of spree killers, highway patrolmen, and nighttime drivers that would eventually populate Nebraska.

Meanwhile, Stephen Graham and Gaby Hoffmann haunt him as his parents in recurring black-and-white flashback sequences, and a scenery-chewing Jeremy Strong, playing Bruce’s manager Jon Landau, flits in and out of the film dripped out in full ’80s-sportswear regalia. In a revealing choice, Landau, an accomplished producer and critic, is presented here as a kind of cross between hype man and life coach, whose primary role is to translate Bruce’s art into corporate jargon for the suits at CBS: “In this office, my office, we believe in Bruce Springsteen.”

Deliver Me from Nowhere is not much interested in probing Springsteen the performer, and it’s even less interested in him as a songwriter. For a film whose plot essentially revolves around the writing and recording of an album, it can’t find a sincere way of imagining the everyday process of writing lyrics and making music. Instead, Cooper, who also wrote the screenplay, reaches for ham-fisted false equivalences between life and art. A scene of Bruce furiously scribbling “why?” while researching Charles Starkweather, the real-life killer who inspired Malick’s Badlands, reminded me of Jason Bourne’s clumsy attempts to uncover his past by filling notebooks with half-remembered words, drawings, and questions like “WHO WAS I?” At its worst, the film leans on a spurious one-to-one connection between Bruce’s increasingly dark and complex songs and his depression, stemming from childhood trauma, all telegraphed through the aforementioned flashback sequences—as if the meaning and potency of artistic expression could be fully explained away in terms of its creator’s mental health, and more specifically in this case, boiled down to Bruce’s relationship with his father.

Framing the songs as only being about “what Bruce is going through” also allows the film to pump up artificial drama about the music’s commercial viability or lack thereof, with Strong’s Landau running interference between Bruce’s sadness and the “real world” of record executives and studio engineers. Thus, a scene depicting Bruce and the E Street Band recording “Born in the U.S.A.” in the studio can only be about how Bruce shelves a hit record in favor of his emo bedroom music. Shockingly, no one cares to say anything at all about the content of the song itself, whose famously bleak lyrics depict an emotionally wrecked Vietnam vet returning home to an indifferent and contemptuous American society. In fact, there’s not one suggestion in the entire film that these songs have anything to do with the political or social world around him.

It’s a shame, because Nebraska is an intensely cinematic album—one that Springsteen often describes in terms of its characters, atmospheres, and spaces rather than his own personal struggle and redemption. It’s densely packed with detail and texture, a road map of a uniquely American isolation through specific place names (Lincoln, Perrineville, Mahwah), imagistic phrases (“They blew up the chicken man in Philly last night”; “I remember Wanda up on scrap metal hill”), and repeating motifs, like the radio relay and refinery towers, the debts no honest man can pay, and the spectral glow of the New Jersey Turnpike “in the wee wee hours,” looking like some “lunar landscape.”

What Springsteen found in filmic influences like Malick’s Badlands and Charles Laughton’s 1955 psychological thriller The Night of the Hunter (which Dutch Springsteen takes young Bruce to see in Deliver Me from Nowhere) was more than a just the character model in the sociopathic American killer—it was what he called the “deadly meditative feeling of nature . . . [that] brings forth a sort of mythic dread.” He found that dread lurking just beyond the manicured front lawn of Sissy Spacek’s childhood home in Badlands and in Laughton’s famously spooky cutaway to a pair of rabbits silently keeping watch along a riverbed. This feeling comes across in the album’s dead-space tape hiss and ghostly reverb effects as much as it does in its clipped, sketch-like stories of violence, fear, and memory. Landau armchair-psychologizes at one point in the film, claiming these dark songs are really just Bruce’s personal confession of guilt and unresolved trauma. They’re a cry for help, he insists. But, as per usual, the Boss says it better, in compelling terms that expand outward rather than close in on themselves: “Everyone knows what it’s like to be condemned.”