Most fans of the great entertainer Bruce Springsteen will probably think that the new biopic “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” is about how someone born in Freehold, New Jersey, in September 1949, came from nowhere and became an international sensation. This movie would be about a sequential story spanning many years of squalor and hardship, including sleeping on couches, living in a car, and in bad hotel rooms, with no money, hunger, and desperation, and somehow never giving up the impossible dream of becoming a famous singer. This film would also be about his friends in “The E Street Band” and how their friendships grew, and how they all overcame so many years of bad times and then finally tremendous success.
Unfortunately, this movie is not about any of these things. The screenwriter/director, Scott Cooper, decided to make this entire movie about a small moment in time in Springsteen’s career after his album “The River” was released, when Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) spent time in a rented house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, and records a new album on low-quality sound equipment and spends too much of the remaining movie brooding and depressed over releasing this new album “Nebraska” as he recorded it originally. This includes many disagreements with his manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), and his off and on again relationship with a single mother Faye Romano (Odessa Young), which, due to his conflicts and depression he treats very badly in this film. Ongoing flashbacks with Springsteen and his abusive alcoholic father (Stephen Graham) are at times hard to watch, because his father turned his anger and rage over his horrible life and bad jobs out on his wife and son, a life reality familiar to too many of us.
Most impressive are the way too few singing performances of Jeremy Allen White, who closely masters the sounds and single style of one of the greatest singers of all time. Anyone would have to admire the amount of hours of training and practice to master a voice as challenging as Springsteen’s.
Once again, in an effort to do something new and different, a great opportunity was lost with this movie because just about everybody would rather see a true biography and not a small, depressing excerpt of the career of Bruce Springsteen. This is the reason behind the low ratings of 61% on Rotten Tomatoes, making a movie that should have been a huge hit, a big miss, for reasons that are so obvious. Overal I also rate this movie a pass, only recommending the scenes of some good acting and the too few singing performances of Jeremy Allen White.
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