Nebraska is one of the great American records. Not just because of its rusted-knife lyrics, its haunted vocals, its guitar-string echoes and the sounds of harmonicas disappearing over the horizon—it’s also because the album transcended Bruce Springsteen’s oeuvre to reach its place within the history of American music. To understand Nebraska, one must first understand where it came from. On paper, this is exactly what Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is about. However, Scott Cooper’s film fails Warren Zanes’ masterful monograph on the album by clearing away the book’s intentional fog and filling it in with all the wrong details. Cooper is not interested in finding the real Bruce, but instead searches for an amalgamative Springsteen while using his most idiosyncratic and salient work as the centerpiece.
Nebraska wasn’t so much written as it was something that blew through the curtains and into Springsteen’s bedroom recording studio. Springsteen was known for his vigor on stage, with raucous, multi-hour live sets being the norm on his tours with the E Street Band. It was no different in the studio—although, in that case, it was to the band’s chagrin. They recorded over 80 tracks for The River, his album directly before Nebraska, which got whittled down to a still prolix double LP. The River was a massive success, and yielded Springsteen his first top 10 hit with “Hungry Heart.” The band, however, was fraying, with Steven Van Zandt even quitting over Springsteen’s arduous studio process. Springsteen was a perfectionist, but psychologically there was more to it. As Zanes put it, “To complete an album is to choose an arbitrary point at which to stop working, nothing more, and Springsteen didn’t like making that choice, because, after that, you didn’t have any choices.”
For Nebraska, Springsteen let go of that impulse. Instead of fighting to create, he fought to preserve. Something happened in the bedroom of Bruce’s rented Colts Neck house while hiding from a rock-star life that he didn’t connect with or really understand. He was laying low and driving back to old haunts in Asbury Park to make guest appearances at local club shows, the kind he cut his teeth in. Meanwhile, the words were starting to flow, although he didn’t really know where they were heading.
First was “Mansion On A Hill,” a Proustian memory of childhood mystery flashing back at him as song lyrics. Then, one night, he was flipping through the TV and caught Terrence Malick’s obfuscated Western debut Badlands. The film would become an obsession, both because of its unplaceable tone dancing between whimsy and violence as Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek ran amok in the West, and because of how that Starkweather-like murder spree harkened back not to the ’50s that Reagan was selling, but the one of ruin and peril that Springsteen grew up in.
Springsteen’s music isn’t usually directly political. With the exception of “Born In The U.S.A.” (which itself is unique in that it was originally conceived for the Paul Schrader film Light Of Day and kept the movie’s working title as the song’s own), Springsteen’s music is never didactic or polemical—it is evocative rather than provocative. A song like “Factory” off Darkness At The Edge Of Town doesn’t have much to say about blue collar work beyond the obvious (“Factory takes his hearing / factory makes his life”), but it expresses the emotionality of that milieu. Even in his corniest outings, Springsteen’s desperate vocals elevate songs like “Crush On You” and “I Wanna Marry You” into frenetic romances.
Transpose that onto the subject matter of Nebraska—spree killings, childhood trauma, familial regret, running with nowhere to go—and its lo-fi production, and the album emerges from the undercurrent running through folk and country that Greil Marcus, in his book Invisible Republic, says comes out of the “old, weird America,” full of forgotten Appalachian fiddlers, Delta bluesmen, and yodeling hobos. Where Bob Dylan drew from Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music for The Basement Tapes, Springsteen chased his own ghostly idols, like elusive rockabilly singer Hank Mizell, who dropped off the face of the Earth after leaving “Jungle Rock” rolling around in his wake. Malick, too, was a Mizell-like figure for Springsteen, having been early in his Hollywood hiatus at the time when Springsteen was finding Nebraska. Springsteen, hiding from stardom, wanted to be a ghost like them.
What makes Nebraska so powerful is that echo coming off of it, the sounds heard far away in some distant prairie. To close that distance would be to betray what makes Nebraska great. Zanes knows this, and is careful to not let Deliver Me From Nowhere explicate on biographical details that might be imbued in the songs or dive too deep into what Nebraska is trying to be—you could just reach for Springsteen’s autobiography to get that. Instead Zanes looks to where Nebraska originated, and all the debris it picked up as a tornado that tore through that bombastic moment in American music. It can all be found in the covers: Nebraska is famously, controversially bereft of Bruce on the album’s face, opting instead for an empty, rainy road off the hood of a car, while Deliver Me From Nowhere features a David Michael Kennedy photo of the Boss taken in the same shoot, with Springsteen’s face barely peering out on the top left of the book, hidden behind the barristers of an old wooden house. It’s representative of his film’s failures that Scott Cooper puts Springsteen front and center, both in the title and in the movie itself.
We don’t need a film where we literally see a young Bruce and his sister “out in the tall corn fields” from “Mansion On A Hill,” photographed in the literal black-and-white in which Springsteen symbolically described his childhood—it depreciates the value of the original work. It almost doesn’t matter that Cooper’s direction is so staid, or that his script is so generic—doing the typical music biopic schtick of flashing back to the artist’s childhood to define an origin story—because Deliver Me From Nowhere already betrays its source’s analysis by trying to nail down the ephemeral, to know Bruce at the moment he knew himself the least.
Cooper expands the purview of Zanes’ book to look more at Springsteen’s childhood and invent a burgeoning romance. This is exactly what a casual fan might expect from a Springsteen movie. But, again, in this detail, Deliver Me From Nowhere conceals where Nebraska really came from. For instance, Springsteen started a complicated relationship with his current wife Patti Scialfa at The Stone Pony in Asbury Park, which in Cooper’s film is transformed into Bruce meeting composite character Faye Romano (Odessa Young), the kid sister of someone he barely remembers from high school. She’s a Springsteen superfan, and he’s a lonely star. But it was actually the other way around—it was Springsteen who saw Scialfa perform at The Stone Pony. Sure, Bruce met Scialfa in ’84 and the film predominantly takes place from ’81 to ’82. But the admiration is key: Springsteen became close with her first as a musician.
But if the romantic plot was written to avoid a timeline faux pas, it’s the one time the film bends to reality. The film purports that catching Badlands on TV was the impetus for album itself when Springsteen had already been working on “Mansion On A Hill” for some time—there is a minor truth in the revelation, but Badlands wasn’t the origin of Nebraska so much as it gave direction to was Bruce was already working on. The worst misplacement of all is a “Frankie Teardrop” needledrop in the film played as if Springsteen hadn’t heard the song until he was already in his Nebraska mania. In reality, Springsteen had met Suicide frontman Alan Vega in 1980 during their respective sessions at New York’s Power Station—Springsteen with The River, Vega with Suicide: Alan Vega And Martin Rev—and the poppier artist took an affinity to his more aggressively avant-garde counterpart. Suicide’s music, in its confidently morose tone, laid groundwork for Nebraska; what’s “Johnny 99” without its unphased violence or “State Trooper” without its repetitive, driving guitar? To frame Springsteen as merely playing the record on repeat when he’s manically depressed tears the truth apart about how one of these recordings leads to another.
Moreover, in rewriting history into clichés, Cooper obscures just how unique the development and release of Nebraska was. In the last act of the film, Jon Landau (played like a second-rate Woody Allen impersonator by Jeremy Strong) shows the master of Nebraska to Columbia record executive Al Teller (David Krumholtz). On paper, it’s the same interaction as in Zanes’ book, but the tone is all wrong. Sure, Teller was baffled by Nebraska and how he was supposed to sell it, but Teller and Columbia were actively supportive of Springsteen regardless—he was considered a “prestige artist,” someone worth a long-term investment even if every single album wasn’t a hit. It’s easy to hate on the suits, but Cooper’s film misunderstands their acumen, simplifying the narrative and trying to make it seem like Nebraska was more of a “fuck you” to them than it really was, which gives the end title card announcing that it hit number three on the charts a simple, triumphant quality.
Then there’s how Cooper portrays Springsteen’s mania. Springsteen was insistent on Nebraska‘s sound. What he captured on that TEAC 4-track couldn’t be recreated in the studio. Cooper frames this attitude as deriving from Springsteen’s unaddressed depression and anxiety, which he then diagnoses as stemming from Bruce’s traumatic relationship with his alcoholic father. Again, there may be truth in that, but it is not what makes Nebraska great. Cooper at once misunderstands the power of the album—its heartbreaking distance—by turning its conception into an intimate narrative film. That original sin would be enough to damn Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, but it becomes all the more dreadful when Cooper turns the impossibility of “My Father’s House” into a story of reconciliation between Springsteen and his dad. That feeling of being completely lost is completely gone.
Zanes points out that Springsteen’s cross-country road trip with Matt Delia after Nebraska‘s release is effectively the centerpiece of Bruce’s memoir Born To Run, and it’s here again that Cooper gets it all wrong. Springsteen suffered a total mental breakdown on his run to his new home in L.A. Zanes writes that Springsteen “and Delia had driven through the South and were coming into the vast midwestern and western landscapes of prairie and plain, when a rupture took place within him.” That cross-country move was a physical embodiment of the kind of running Springsteen had been doing mentally all his life, the kind that birthed both anthemic hits and the haunted hummings of Nebraska. Cooper has this trip serve as a reflection point where Bruce can finally address his mental health problems, in service of a happy ending with the triumphant return to the top with Born In The U.S.A.
But that album, too, is filled with tension—it’s about an American dream which doesn’t exist. Contrast the fantasy of Brian De Palma’s video for “Dancing In The Dark” or John Sayles’ more erotically-charged, melodramatic video for “I’m On Fire” with Barry Ralbag’s music video for “Atlantic City,” whose documentary footage of the famed boardwalk town is like if Robert Frank’s The Americans was always in a moving car. In the latter, Bruce is absent. Although about two-and-a-half minutes in, a man walks in front of a cold, glaring sun with a recognizably lanky, hands-in-pocket walk. Springsteen is a specter, not one we can get close to, but one who speaks to us through the void.
In order for Springsteen to make Nebraska, he had to become his own Hank Mizell and disappear back into his New Jersey memories, haunting highways and local nightclubs instead of being the man on magazine covers. This isn’t an option for Cooper’s film, given that the picture also serves as a star-maker for Jeremy Allen White, forcing a performance that is both recognizable to the casual Springsteen fan while also attempting to spotlight an icon who is trying to disappear.
Springsteen did disappear into Nebraska—doing no press, no interviews—and it was the reverberations that came out of his room which have influenced the next generation, in the same way that he and Dylan’s mythic predecessors influenced them. Zanes’ book dedicates a significant number of pages to talking about how Nebraska, in turn, influenced musicians like Matt Berninger from The National, who argues that bands like Pavement, Silver Jews, Guided By Voices, and Bon Iver were following Nebraska‘s “big bang of the indie rock that was about making shit alone in your bedroom.” This is the perspective that Cooper’s film loses by only tying Nebraska into Springsteen as a symbol, as an icon, as the straightforward subject of a biopic. Zanes sees Springsteen as something greater, a wandering rock bodhisattva who is least satisfied when he’s at his most famous. Zanes opens Deliver Me From Nowhere with an anecdote about one of his bands playing some busted-down southern joint in the mid-80s. Springsteen, hot on the heels of his Born In The U.S.A. tour, walked into their 100-person venue and asked to play with them. “When our dressing room door opened and Bruce Springsteen walked in, we had one thought: That’s the guy who made Nebraska.”
