Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere review – is the biopic worth a cinema trip?

Early on in Deliver Me From Nowhere, the man of the hour is shopping for a new set of wheels when the smooth-talking dealer tells him "I do know who you are".

Bruce Springsteen, checking out the dashboard cassette player on a sporty little number, shrugs and says: “Well, that makes one of us."

It’s an awkwardly glib exchange, unnecessarily reminding viewers they’re watching an account of a musician familiar to millions struggling with his own identity, and an example of the weak dialogue that occasionally threatens to derail an otherwise solid drama.

We’ve been here before, and not that long ago; it’s less than a year since the release of A Complete Unknown and Timothee Chalamet’s Bob Dylan navigating an equally soul-searching creative crossroads.

As voices of their generations, Bob and Bruce are cut from not entirely dissimilar cloth, so it’s inevitable that fans of either or both will indulge in studious games of compare/contrast between the two offerings.

One intriguing difference is that while the earlier film is inspired by events leading up to Dylan infamously "going electric," The Boss biopic largely concerns itself with Springsteen doing practically the opposite.

We first see Jeremy Allen White’s Springsteen drenched in sweat during the closing number of the last show of a lengthy arena tour to promote his and the E Street Band’s 1980 album The River, Bruce’s first US chart-topper and the global breakthrough that would go on to sell seven million copies worldwide.

All is not well, though, as rapidly escalating fame sits uncomfortably on his shoulders, further scratching an itch to dial down the bombast and get back to basics – it’s time to buy a primitive tape machine and retreat to a weather-beaten cottage in semi-rural New Jersey.

That, in a nutshell, is the central theme of the source material, author Warren Zanes's acclaimed book of the same name about the making of Springsteen’s next LP, the low-key and decidedly lo-fi Nebraska.

Consequently, the film shadows a Springsteen shorn of superstar trappings, to fashion a compelling portrait of self-examination, and song as a form of therapy.

The premise largely requires White to cut an introspective figure, far from the strutting peacock of Bruce’s stage persona, confronting unresolved issues from his past.

Prominent in those memories is a difficult, frequently violent relationship with his father (an intense Stephen Graham, mostly seen in cold monochrome flashbacks), resulting in the slow realisation that many of these new songs are unwittingly autobiographical; at one point we see Bruce poring over a notepad and changing the tense of his lyrics from third person to first.

There’s no shortage of images of White staring into the middle distance, arguably a little too doe-eyed and baby-faced to fully convince as a grown man wrestling with increasingly less dormant inner conflicts, and frustrated when trying to articulate his fresh artistic vision to others.

A love interest subplot involving Bruce’s reluctance, perhaps inability, to commit to a relationship with a local single mother (Odessa Young) is more a distraction than key to the narrative, while the first few scenes he shares with manager and mentor Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) are painfully pedestrian.

Landau’s lasting importance to Springsteen’s success cannot be over-emphasised, but his initial purpose here seems to be as a pragmatic feet-in-both-camps buffer between his charge and the big bad hits-hungry record label, dispensing soundbite exposition so simplistic he may as well be wearing a succession of sandwich boards.

Thankfully, Strong has more to get his teeth into as the film progresses, and director Scott Cooper eventually establishes a powerful bond between the two men, his actors expressing a totally believable mutual tenderness.

Springsteen’s writing has walked hand-in-hand with cinema for decades, from his 1973 street-smarts serenade Rosalita mining the romance and cultural divides of West Side Story, to pockets of the 2019 album Western Stars exploring the vanishing America of director Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, and it provides touchstones in Cooper’s screenplay.

When figuring out where he’s going with Nebraska’s contents, White/Springsteen catches a re-run of early ‘70s murderous youth classic Badlands on TV, and there’s a brief glimpse of boyhood Bruce and his dad in a darkened fleapit watching Robert Mitchum in The Night Of The Hunter (a film about a violent father figure, no less).

Those scenes, however short, play a part in cementing the intimacy of the film and of its subject’s thought processes – significantly more than sequences with the E Street Band that expose White as lacking the physical presence of Springsteen the performer.

Deliver Me From Nowhere works best when it’s small, when its sharper focus is on a troubled thirty-something burying himself in the creation of what would become one of his most celebrated records, digging deep into music both haunting and healing.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is released in UK cinemas on Friday 24th November 2025.

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