SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE Review: Capturing the Heart and Soul of a Tortured Artist

Told with quiet grace and respectful grandeur, the film captures the heart and soul of an artist who never realized he was tortured.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
The film opens Friday, October 22, throughout North America, only in movie theaters, via 20th Century Studios. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.

Covered in sackcloth and ashes, Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) strides through life, never quite grasping why anyone would admire him.

Surrounded by friends, everyone calls him "boss." They treat him with deferential respect, and defer to his every wish, because they are convinced that he is a rare talent who must be treated with kid gloves. In his own eyes, though, he's just a kid from New Jersey whose motivating goal in life is to expunge his soul into his songs.

Sometimes, that means other people are hurt by what he does. That's the shadow that hangs over a relationship he begins with Faye (Odessa Young), a single mother. She can't quite believe that he finally noticed her; she'd been hanging around The Stony Pony, a small music club in New Jersey where Springsteen often played, for years, solely for the pleasure of the music.

Faye treats Bruce as an ordinary person, and relates to him as an ordinary man, not as a famous person, and their relationship becomes intimate because of how they treat each other: as an ordinary loving couple. Bruce, however, is not an ordinary man: he is a Tortured Artist, even if he doesn't realize it.

Indeed, it's not until 1981, when Bruce concludes his tour in support of The River, that he takes time off to rest, recuperate, and recharge his creative powers. Living alone in a rented house far away from the distractions of life, he reconnects with his memories of his youth, especially a childhood troubled by an angry father (Stephen Graham) who can't express why he is angry, except through shouting and the threat of physical violence.

During that time, as he begins a relationship with Faye, his deepest and darkest emotions come pouring out in songs. His manager and friend, Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), gently guides him on his creative path, but only Bruce can walk that path, and so Jon steps back, knowing that the best way to help him is to defend him.

Adapting Warren Zanes' book, writer/director Scott Cooper creates a rich atmosphere of period detail that burnishes the slender narrative thread, and fills the supporting cast with excellent actors, including Paul Walter Hauser, David Krumholtz, Gaby Hoffman, and Marc Maron. There are flashbacks to Bruce's past, which flesh out his memories, quietly, and without fuss.

Scott Cooper made his directorial debut with Crazy Heart (2009), revolving around an excellent performance from Jeff Bridges. Since then he's made a variety of films, from the criminal thriller Out of the Furnace (2013) to the true gangland picture Black Mass (2015) to the Western drama Hostiles (2017) to the strange horror drama Antlers (2021) to the Western mystery The Pale Blue Eye (2022). In all his films so far, he's tuned into downbeat themes and characters who often are morose and unsettled.

Those themes coalesce in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. Bruce has not fully come to grips with his past. It's never slowed him down before. Faced with increasing success, however, combined with a period of isolation, together with a burgeoning relationship that entails, not only being a good partner, but also a good father, Bruce begins to shut down. He has never confronted his issues from the past, not prepared himself for life, apart from his overwhelming creative drive.

The film does not completely conquer its own cinematic challenges: depicting how an artist is inspired to create and also how clinical depression can rise up to smack anyone down, sometimes for years. Yet Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere gets closer than nearly any other film I've ever seen.