Catching Up on 2025: Josh Reviews Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere takes place during several months in 1981-82, chronicling the tumultuous making of the Boss’ 1982 album Nebraska.  The film was written & directed by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Black Mass), it was adapted from the 2023 book Deliver Me from Nowhere, written by Warren Zanes, and it also incorporates aspects from Springsteen’s 2016 autobiography Born to Run.

I’m something of a sucker for a musical biopic, and I had a great time watching Jeremy Allen White channeling the Boss in this movie!  I am locked in as an enormous fan of Mr. White’s from his gripping and exemplary work on The Bear, and he is terrific here as Bruce Springsteen!  He’s able to convey Bruce’s musical genius — he does a great job singing a bunch of classic Springsteen songs throughout the film — and also playing the drama as we see Bruce wrestle with the demons of his mental health challenges and the lingering trauma of his difficult childhood.

Jeremy Strong (Succession, The Gentlemen, The Trial of the Chicago 7) is fantastic as Bruce’s manager and producer, Jon Landau, who is tasked with loving and supporting his burgeoning superstar client and friend while also placating the music studio brass who just want Bruce to write some more hit singles.  (Between this and Jay Kelly, 2025 was quite a year for movies exploring the long-suffering manager who works for a talented but also mercurial big star!)

The rest of the supporting cast is filled with an array of talented performers, each of whom make the most out of their (relatively small) roles.  I’m always happy to see Paul Walter Hauser (Orion and the Dark, Fantastic Four: First Steps), who has a twinkle in his eye playing Mike Batlan, the recording engineer who hangs with Bruce at his home to help him record the Nebraska tracks.  Stephen Graham (Snatch, Hellboy, Rocketman, and he has gotten a ton of acclaim recently for his work in Adolescence) is a perfect hard-ass as Bruce’s father, Douglas.  He is well-matched with Gaby Hoffman (Transparent, Obvious Child, Long Story Short) as Bruce’s mother, Adele.  Odessa Young makes a strong impact as Faye Romano, a young woman with whom Bruce begins a relationship.  Marc Maron is a welcome presence as Chuck Plotkin, Springsteen’s producer & engineer, as is David Krumholtz (The Deuce, Oppenheimer) as Al Teller, the record executive at Columbia who is frustrated by what he sees as Springsteen’s antics.

The film wisely focuses on a very specific time-period in Bruce Springsteen’s life (rather than being one of those too-expansive biopics that attempts to squeeze a performer’s whole life into two hours).  Bruce is on the cusp of super-stardom, having just completed touring The River (which included performances of “Born to Run”), and he finds himself somewhat ambivalent about fame.  He wants to create serious music that expresses his thoughts and feelings, rather than providing his record company with the more obvious pop-chart hits they’re hoping for.  And he’s battling serious depression.  Exploring how Springsteen fights through all that to create art, and eventually find his way into therapy, is a great subject for a film.  Mr. White’s emotive performance allows us as an audience to get into Bruce’s head, even though this is a character who isn’t prone to making long speeches about what he’s thinking.  I’m also always delighted by stories that explore the minutia of how art gets made, so the scenes of Bruce’s crafting the songs of Nebraska, in his house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, far away from a traditional recording studio, were fascinating to me.

I basically loved this movie right up until the final ten minutes or so, which I felt rushed through to an ending that seemed too quick and easy to me.  It felt like they jumped over some critical pieces of the story.  We’ve spent two hours watching Bruce’s struggles with mental health, until he finally accepts the idea of going to therapy… then we jump to one speech in a therapist’s office and the movie is basically over?  I don’t think it works like that!  I didn’t need to watch two more hours of therapy, but a few scenes that allowed us to see a more gradual process of Bruce’s taming his demons would’ve been welcomed by me.  I also felt the movie sort of dodges the story of how poorly Bruce treated Faye.  We follow their relationship for most of the movie; I felt we needed at least one more scene of closure for that relationship (even if perhaps that didn’t actually happen in real-life).  (Actually, some reading after seeing this movie reveals that Faye was not a real character, but rather a composite of several women who Bruce dated at the time.  All the more so, if this is a fictionalized piece of the movie, I’d have liked to have seen a more satisfying resolution to this character and this storyline.)

Still, I had a fun time watching this.  This made my list of my favorite movies of 2025.  It’s a fascinating spotlight on one of the greatest musicians of our era.  The music in the movie is fantastic, and all of the acting performances are top-notch.

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