YNOT at the Movies

Bruce Springsteen may be known to millions as The Boss, but director Scott Cooper's "Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere" (USA 2025 | 120 min.) isn't about the rock legend who commands stadiums. It's about the man behind the myth, alone in the quiet, reckoning with his ghosts. Adapted from Warren Zanes' nonfiction book Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, the film narrows its focus to a single, turbulent chapter in the artist's life.

Set in the early 1980s, the story finds Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) returning home to New Jersey after The River, the 1980 double album that catapulted him to mainstream success. Instead of basking in fame, Bruce retreats to a small house in Colts Neck, burdened by anxiety, depression, and a strained relationship with his father, Doug (Stephen Graham). As he starts writing the raw, mournful songs that will become Nebraska, his producer Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) remains beside him, more than a collaborator, almost a believer whose faith in Bruce feels absolute.

That focus gives the film both its strength and its limitations. Scott Cooper intentionally avoids the typical rise-and-fall rhythm of musical biopics, offering instead a character study of a man wrestling with daddy issues and inherited pain. Yet while the film conveys the inner darkness that produced Nebraska, it doesn't explore what made that album so revolutionary, either for Springsteen's career or for American music. The result is a portrait rich in mood but thin in insight about the art itself.

For devoted fans, that omission may sting. "Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere" reveres its subject yet skirts the deeper questions of creativity, offering little sense of how Springsteen's raw, four-track home recordings became one of rock's most enduring statements. And for those unfamiliar with his work, the emotional undercurrents may not resonate since the story assumes an existing affection for both the artist and his legend.

The film's attempt at a romantic thread, featuring Faye (Odessa Young), feels particularly thin. The relationship is meant to reveal Bruce's emotional distance and vulnerability, yet it comes across as forced and underdeveloped, a subplot that adds little to the film's emotional core.

The performances, however, keep the film compelling. Jeremy Allen White captures Springsteen's mix of brooding intensity and fragile vulnerability, embodying a man both driven and adrift. Jeremy Strong is mesmerizing as Jon Landau, a mentor whose unwavering confidence in Bruce feels like faith itself, though the film never explains what forged that bond or why his loyalty runs so deep.

The film is steeped in muted tones, bare interiors, and the quiet ache of isolation. It is beautifully made and deeply affecting, though not uplifting. While Bruce's childhood clearly shaped his music, the film never forges that emotional connection for the audience; the influence is suggested rather than felt.

In the end, the film finds the man but not quite the music. It is a finely acted, intimate reflection on mindset and devotion, yet it fades just before reaching transcendence, like a song that stops on the last chord and leaves the echo to say what the words do not.

"Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere" opens in theaters on Friday, October 24, 2025.