Springsteen: Deliver me from Nowhere (2025) - A Guest Review by Chad Dixon

Adapted from the book, Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska by Warren Zanes, this feature film is not technically a biopic as it just covers a very specific short period of the iconic rocker from New Jersey's life in the early 1980's. Fresh from the success of touring his most recent album, The River, 32 year old Bruce (Jeremy Allen White), has entered a period of soul-searching as it seems dark memories from his past seems to be playing heavily on his mind and he begins to retreat from the limelight.

He decides to rent a house by a lake in the country near his home town in New Jersey to explore these thoughts alone and see if they lead to anything constructive that he can channel into a new album. Even his good friend and Record Producer, Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), can't seem to convince him that the incredible momentum gained from the previous release shouldn't be squandered right now. Bruce is adamant and orders a home four-track mixing desk (the Tascam Portastudio 144), that records only to cassette and with just a couple of guitars and a harmonica, he gets down to it.

The film actually starts in 1956, Freehold, New Jersey, where Bruce is 7 years old. Living in a modest house with his sister, Virginia, and working class parents - loving and supportive mother, Adele (Gaby Hoffmann) and troubled and alcoholic father, Douglas (Stephen Graham). It's clear that the strained relationship he has with his father is the darkness descending on the 32 year-old Springsteen. Periodic flashbacks (shown in black & white) of those days of his youth peppers the film as the adult Bruce desperately uses this time alone to cathartically work out his demons and create a very personal body of work.

Early on, we see a live on-stage performance of Born to Run with the East Street Band. In this scene and throughout, Jeremy's embodiment of the thirty-something Springsteen's persona is very impressive, doing all the singing and playing himself. Strong, however, is also excellent as the ever supportive Landau, assertively fighting off pressure from Al Teller (David Krumholtz), a pushy Columbia Records executive who is constantly criticising the Nebraska album project for being very uncharacteristic for what Springsteen has been acclaimed for up till then.

I wasn't to sure about the sub plot of the on/off romantic relationship with the sister of one his old high school buddies. Faye (Odessa Young), who he meets after one of his impromptu gigs with an unnamed local band. This didn't add much to the story and seemed like just filler in the 1 hour 59 minute runtime. I would have much rather seen more scenes with the band and in the recording studio. I also noted that although the film spans a number of months, it always seems to be Autumn, as the colours are constantly prominent by the lakeside house.

There's a couple of main takeaways here. I think the viewer has the be a fan of Springsteen and the process of creating music in general, as the core of the film concentrates a lot on using that Tascam Portastudio 144 to lay down those tracks. However, because I was a bit of a cassette recording fan in the 80s, all the analog tech used here brought back a lot of lovely nostalgia - the sound of 'play' buttons clicking on and gain-level needles flicking from left to right. Scott Cooper's direction perfectly captures the mood of Bruce's life at this time and overall, although a little slow in pace, was for me, a satisfying watch.