There’s a story that Bruce Springsteen tells before “The River,” played live in 1985 at the LA Coliseum. The story centers around his fraught relationship with his dad. He talks about the fights they used to have, and how he’d have to work up the nerve to go home to face him. He recalls how his father used to tell him that he couldn’t wait until the Army got him – they’d make a man out of him.
Bruce eventually got his draft notice for Vietnam and took his physical, which he failed. When he got home and told his father what happened, his father simply said – despite all his talk of masculinity and war – “That’s good.”
This is a great encapsulation of Springsteen’s relationship to his father, which colors much of his music and the literature surrounding him, as well as Scott Cooper’s new film “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.” The story is vulnerable and revealing in ways that aren’t explicit. There’s no real conclusion to the story – it just kind of ends, betraying the ongoing nature of this fraught emotional relationship. It lingers in all that’s unsaid.
There are moments in “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” based on Warren Zanes’ 2023 book of the same name, that manage to capture this ephemeral quality, digging into something deeper about Bruce (played in the film by Jeremy Allen White), his struggle with depression, and his connection to the people and world around him. But those moments are eclipsed by a far too literal interpretation of his life, bogged down by endless exposition and montages that only just scratch the surface.
“Deliver Me From Nowhere” follows Bruce while he’s writing “Nebraska,” his sparse, brilliant 1982 album that he recorded alone on a four-track recorder in his bedroom. As any good folk album is, “Nebraska” is at once searingly personal and universal. It’s a harsh, brutal take on the American Dream focusing on the trials of blue collar, hardworking people – people like Bruce’s father, Douglas (Stephen Graham).
The movie, for the most part, manages to capture the complexity of Bruce’s relationship with his father. A lot of that is due to Graham’s alternately unflinching and vulnerable performance. Douglas (known as Dutch) struggled with alcoholism and undiagnosed mental health issues through his life. In the moments we see of Bruce’s childhood, Graham is terrifying – hard with a face like a bull, cruel and crude, confused by this artistic, sensitive child of his. His hardness, though, is underpinned by sadness, and sickness, and a hard, hard life. Bruce finds it both hard to blame him and hard to forgive him.
In one scene long after Bruce has become famous and his parents have moved to California, Dutch disappears. Bruce flies out and spends the night running around Chinatown before finding his dad at the bar. It’s the first time we’ve seen Dutch as an older man, and his face and body are that of someone completely beaten down by life. Bruce and his father would later reconcile, and it’s in this scene that you can see the man softening, beginning to face his past. When the bartender tells Bruce that his father is a nice man, Dutch lets out a quiet, heartbreaking, “Am I?” These are the kind of people that “Nebraska” is about – plagued by the meanness of the world, trapped and desperately trying to escape.
That moment of dialogue is one of the best in “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” and White reacts incredibly well to it. He’s solid throughout the film, more warm and inviting than he’s ever been, wonderfully capturing the soulfulness so associated with Bruce. Unfortunately, throughout the first half of the movie especially, he’s not called to do much besides stare off into the middle distance, or furiously scribble lyrics on pieces of paper (you know, the most cinematic thing in the world). “Deliver Me From Nowhere” tries to compensate for this staleness through Masanobu Takayanagi’s cinematography, which attempts to evoke the dreaminess of a Terrence Malick movie (one of the films Bruce gets caught up in while brainstorming ideas for “Nebraska” is “Badlands.”) But using Malick’s aesthetic as a calling card and actually digging into the beauty and isolation of that aesthetic are two very different things.
For the most part, the content and dialogue of “Deliver Me From Nowhere” are too hyper literal to evoke true feeling. Jeremy Strong, who plays Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau, gets saddled with the brunt of this problem. He functions almost solely as an exposition machine or as a way to explain to the audience (usually by explaining to his wife, played by Grace Gummer, who truly has nothing to work) the psyche of Bruce Springsteen. He has one line of dialogue where he literally starts listing off the names of popular Bruce Springsteen songs – you know, in case we all forgot that this is the man who wrote “Born in the USA.” It’s a little appalling.
Particularly for a movie about the making of “Nebraska” – quite an impressionistic, abstract album – the literalism in “Deliver Me From Nowhere” feels off putting. That’s not to say there’s nothing worth writing home about in the film. Bruce’s attempts to understand his own artistic expression and his past through the art that moves him – whether that be “Badlands,” or the punk band Suicide, or the stories of Flannery O’Connor – is a fascinating throughline. In one of the film’s best sequences, the song “My Father’s House” coincides with scenes from Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter,” a movie Bruce’s father took him to see when he was young.
In the lyrics of “My Father’s House,” the narrator recalls a dream he had, imagining himself as a child running through a dark forest with “the devil snappin’ at my heels,” trying desperately to get to his father’s house. When the narrator awakes, he feels a need to see his father and reconcile with him. But when he arrives at the house from his dreams, his father is gone, their reunion ruined. In connection with “The Night of the Hunter,” a terrifyingly expressionistic film about a serial killer (Robert Mitchum) pursuing two young children, “My Father’s House” takes on a brand new meaning. Bruce’s father becomes both the devil at his back and the safety and love represented by the house. The narrator escapes one, but still cannot find the other.
It’s by far the most evocative moment in “Springsteen,” and perhaps makes the whole thing worth it. But then again, there’s one moment where Bruce remembers a time he saw a mansion on a hill and proceeds to write … “Mansion on a Hill.” Unfortunately, “Springsteen” tends to lean in this direction.
