Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere

This biopic frames the making of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska in the context of his own psychological turmoil, at the omission of the broader social and political strife it also channelled.

A tortured Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) traipsing the city streets alone in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (20th Century Studios).

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This post is part of the regular ‘One Take’ series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warning: Alcoholism; Murder; Mental illness.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

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In 1981, Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) has just finished touring with his group, The E Street Band. His latest album The River has topped the American charts, and its lead single ‘Hungry Heart’ given him his first Billboard Top 10 hit. Struggling to acclimatise to this newfound fame and to readjust to life off the stage, he retreats to a house near where he grew up in New Jersey, rented on his behalf by staunchly supportive manager and producer Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong). There he starts work on demos of new songs using a four-track recorder supplied by his dutiful guitar technician Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser). He also jams in his spare time with the house band at local music venue The Stone Pony. It is after one such performance that he meets Faye Romano (Odessa Young), the sister of a former classmate, and a waitress and single mother. They begin dating, and Bruce grows closer with both Faye and her young daughter, Haley.

Bruce’s new songs are distinctly darker and more insular in theme than his previous output. They channel his memories of his childhood, shown in black-and-white flashbacks, of his loving relationship with his mother Adele (Gaby Hoffmann) and his much more difficult one with his alcoholic father Douglas (Stephen Graham). Bruce is insistent on maintaining the lo-fi sound captured in his rudimentary home studio, feeling that fuller arrangements would not do justice the authenticity of this deeply personal nascent new album. He titles it Nebraska after the home state and place of trial and execution of the late 1950s teenage serial killer Charles Starkweather, whose story is recounted on the album’s title track.

This poses a challenge to Jon Landau, who not only has to balance the commercial expectations of Bruce’s record label Columbia with the musician’s uncompromising stance, but who also recognises in these new songs signs of his friend’s worsening mental health, manifesting in his increasingly tempestuous behaviour within and beyond the studio. Bruce’s intense work ethic and growing erraticism threaten to jeopardise his relationship with Faye as well. She, Jon, and others find themselves somewhat helplessly looking on as Bruce – seemingly on the cusp of both superstardom and romantic contentment – spirals inexorably towards a breakdown.

Biopic, reissue, and canon

Deliver Me from Nowhere is based upon music writer Warren Zanes’ book of the same name, published in 2023, as well as on parts of Springsteen’s own 2016 autobiography, Born to Run. Book and film are both titled after a lyric featured on two separate tracks on Nebraska, ‘State Trooper’ and ‘Open All Night’. The film was made with Springsteen’s own full involvement, and its release coincided with that of a box set, Nebraska ‘82: Expanded Edition. The set consists of four discs (or records):

1. Principally outtakes of acoustic songs written for the album but that did not make the final cut, including a demo of an early version of ‘Born in the U.S.A.’.

2. The fabled ‘Electric Nebraska’: a collection of recordings Springsteen made at the time, mostly of songs that would end up in solo, acoustic form on Nebraska (as well as again, Born in the U.S.A.), and whose existence had long been rumoured.

3. A full live performance of Nebraska, played by Springsteen without an audience over forty years after the album’s original release.

4. The original Nebraska album.

In many ways the role of Deliver Me from Nowhere is analogous to that of Nebraska ‘82. It broadens Nebraska from an album into a period piece by way of more expansive contextualisation. It conveys the extent of Springsteen’s almost compulsive creativity and productivity as he rapidly composes a vast repertoire of new songs, more than ultimately ended up on Nebraska itself (at one point in the film Bruce ponders the possibility it might be a double album). It showcases (but also explains) the discarded possibility of Nebraska having been another E Street Band album and Springsteen’s turning away from that possibility. And it locates the album firmly in its creator’s contemporary lifeworld, albeit with the conventions of the biopic meaning that thickened past still functions as part of our wider understanding of his personal and career arc.

The film’s premise is essentially that Springsteen in 1981 is on the verge of being a superstar, but that in order to get there he has to first take a highly risky, left-field turn that could potentially jeopardise his career (except Jon Landau’s role in the film is such that this never really carries much threat), in order to confront and conquer his own personal demons. And that superstardom looms in the form of his huge follow-up album, Born in the U.S.A.. Deliver Me from Nowhere is almost pregnant with that coming moment, particularly in the subplot of how he comes to write its title track and then performs an ecstatic version of it with the band for his mightily impressed manager, but nonetheless feels he must return to working on and putting out Nebraska. It is therefore a film about the making of Nebraska, but also about what it took for Springsteen to get to where he could record its career-defining successor.

Springsteen’s America

Deliver Me from Nowhere immerses the viewer in the world of Nebraska by way of peppering with its creator’s cultural and social touchstones. This includes the classic rock’n’roll he jams along to at the Stone Pony, but also the literature of Flannery O’Connor, and films such as the 1973 Terence Malik-directed crime drama Badlands – also based upon Starkweather’s murder spree – and the 1955 film noir The Night of the Hunter, which a young Bruce is shown watching in flashback with his father. These cultural reference points locate Springsteen within a pantheon of great American storytellers.

Yet this storytelling is also how Springsteen captures and relates something real. Back in small-town New Jersey, he is trapped by both his past and his fame. He revisits familiar haunts, sometimes trying to recapture some lost enchantment, sometimes to re-confront old ghosts. The fairgrounds, seafronts, diners, and car rides that comprise his public or semi-public milieu in the film are the regular milieu of his albums up until that point – but when the car salesman recognises him as a famous rock star, and ‘Hungry Heart’ plays on the radio as he drives back from the lot, can he still also be the authentic voice of the places that raised him?

Instead, he retreats into his home studio and writes songs deliberately narrated in the first-person, but written from the perspectives of killers, petty criminals, and other desperate men. These songs, he tells his manager, are the only thing that seem real to him right now, as he struggles to reconnect with both himself and the places he once knew. Yet even more than the lyrics, this realness is sonic, stripping away all other musical accompaniment and studio trickery to leave mainly just his solo vocal and acoustic guitar. It is a pure essence that also requires the stripping away of Bruce Springsteen as star persona: no photo of him on the cover; no accompanying tour; Nebraska must speak for itself.¹

The personal is apolitical?

This opposition between commercial success on the one hand and authenticity and artistry on the other is integral to Deliver Me from Nowhere. Also central to its premise is that artistry and authenticity are themselves the product of psychological turmoil, and in turn function as a form of self-therapy, in order to get to the point of mental wellness, at which point commercial success can be reconciled. Bruce must suffer to make great music, to make Nebraska; he has to make Nebraska to get to the breaking point where he can seek the help he needs; and he has to go through all that to make Born in the U.S.A.. That is the logic inherent in the film’s chronological framing.

Along with his alienation by his growing fame, Bruce’s worsening mental health owes to his unprocessed trauma over his childhood relationship with his father, who we learn could unpredictably swing from being caring and devoted to cruel and intimidating. The prospect of domestic contentment with Faye and Haley comes with the promise of re-rooting him in the environment he has become estranged from. Yet his immersion in musical perfectionism and the dysfunctional model of family life he has inherited from his own childhood inhibits him from providing the commitment and emotional security Faye needs.

What all this entails, however – and this goes hand-in-hand with commencing the film at the very end of the The River tour – is partitioning Springsteen’s artistry and biography from the socioeconomic and political. Thematically, musically, and emotionally much of The River anticipated what Springsteen did more uncompromisingly and compactly on Nebraska. ‘The River’ and ‘Independence Day’ told stories of marital strife and father-son conflict respectively in the broader context of processes of deindustrialisation and economic decline that exacerbate and dwarf the internal struggles and interpersonal discord Springsteen relayed on them. Many of the songs on Nebraska likewise overtly laid out the economic factors underlying damaged relationships and bad choices, continuing his exploration of the social and material constraints accompanying blue-collar work and community life, and of his protagonists’ often illicit and ultimately doomed efforts to surpass those diminished horizons.

Yet one gets little sense watching Deliver Me from Nowhere of how those factors might have shaped Springsteen’s relationship with his father or their respective struggles with their mental health. Of how his sense of embarrassment by his rising fame and dissociation from the place he grew up related to the bifurcation between his fortunes and those of his former neighbours. Of why an album featuring a line like ‘Down here it’s just winners and losers/And don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line’, as he sang on ‘Atlantic City’, was not just timelessly American, but of That Time in America: Reagan’s first term as President. It is jarring that a film about someone who explicitly located people’s desperation, including semi-autobiographically his own, in the wider historical arcs that swept their lives along does not do the same for him.

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1. In 1982, that is; in 2025, it has a book, film, and boxset to speak for it as well.