Rock's everyman gets an everymovie with the generic Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
Despite being from the director of Crazy Heart, this broad and trope-laden biopic is more like Walk Hard.
Photo: 20th Century Studios
Bruce Springsteen is more American than apple pie. He wears black leather, blue denim, and lumberjack plaid. He likes a simply dressed hot dog. He waits a few dates before he goes in for the first kiss. In his humble New Jersey homeland, he hangs out in autoshops with his mechanic buddies, drives a Mustang that rides the blue-collar-meets-white-collar line he occupies, and stops calling back when things get serious, no matter how much money he has.
Scott Cooper’s biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere meets the heartland rocker ( Jeremy Allen White, who acts and sounds more like a melting pot of the most recent biopic superstars than an era-defining artist) at the turn of the 1980s as he steps back from the burgeoning success that’s come with his first five albums, the last of which (The River) earned him his first #1 charting position at home and abroad, setting his sixth album up for suffocating expectations. At first, Bruce is back and forth between constructing Nebraska in his living room on a 4-track and dreaming up Born In The U.S.A. in the hallowed halls of Power Station’s Studio A. Yo-yoing between stripped-down folk and the quintessential American rock ‘n’ roll that defines his music in recording sessions that couldn’t be more disparate in sound, studio, personnel, and charting potential, Bruce eventually pauses on Born, much to the studio executives’ displeasure, to pursue the brooding, early-Dylan-esque folk pouring darkly out of him in Nebraska.
In between sessions and dates with Faye (Odessa Young), a single mother working as a waitress, Bruce looks back on his life in Walk Hard-like childhood flashbacks drowning in clichés—the kind of flashbacks that had already reached tired trope status in 2007. Sincerely screamed lines like, “I just want to get back to what happened in the bedroom!”—lines more worthy of Dewey Cox and Darlene Madison’s innuendo-laden “Let’s Duet” than a serious drama—land with an awkwardness that infects Cooper’s whole screenplay. One would think the writer and director behind a fictionally based music biopic as searing as Crazy Heart could find a compelling note for an icon as lauded and cinematically untapped as Springsteen. Alas, Bad Blake comes across as more real than Bruce.
In its tender, tough, black-and-white flashback sentimentality, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere channels recent awards-season hopefuls like Maestro and Oppenheimer. But Cooper can’t find the flow between the film’s aesthetics, which play like someone haphazardly stitched Walk The Line and Belfast together and declined to watch it before distribution. He can’t find curiosities or singularities in his subjects.
