In last year’s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet portrayed the singer up to 1965, when he controversially produced an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival. It was an adaptation of a tightly focused book called Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, starring Jeremy Allen White (Carmie in The Bear and global ambassador for Calvin Klein underwear) does much the same for Springsteen, only the other way around: Springsteen Goes Acoustic! In 1981, Springsteen, riding high on the success of his fifth album, The River, and the 140-date tour that followed its release, retreated to write simpler music. In a rural house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, he recorded 17 new songs with a Gibson guitar on a basic, four-track Teac cassette tape recorder. These recordings were originally intended to be demos, but when Springsteen tried upscaling them with the E Street Band he found the results unsatisfactory.
With the help of his sympathetic manager and former music journalist Jon Landau, Springsteen resolved to release ten songs from the tape, exactly as they were, with the sound unimproved. That record of deep Americana, Nebraska, released in 1982, is today rated by many as not just Springsteen’s darkest, most personal work but also his finest.
In 2023, Warren Zanes, in collaboration with Springsteen, published an exhaustive study, Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. That reverential book has now been faithfully adapted into a hagiographic film, again with Springsteen’s participation.
In the afterword to its latest edition, Zanes reprints some text exchanges he had with Springsteen in developing the movie project. “I feel like a film that echoes the spirit of Nebraska could be made,” Zanes suggested. A homespun, acoustic movie. “Let’s do it sooner than later,” Springsteen replied. Deliver Me from Nowhere (a line that concludes two songs from the album) is a faithful translation of the book to the screen – it’s the antidote to the pomp of such music biopics as Rocketman and Bohemian Rhapsody.
Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace, Hostiles) directs and scripts, pretty baldly. We follow Springsteen from a thumping stadium performance of “Born to Run”, which concludes The River tour, to the modest rented house in which he retreats to solitude, haunted by his past and unsolved issues from his upbringing.
On first sight, Jeremy Allen White seems painfully not like Springsteen, in facial features or voice. But White’s own charisma soon eases us into acceptance, though his singing, even enhanced through technical trickery, never quite attains the Boss’s commanding self-pity.
The storytelling is worthy of a Ladybird book in its illustrative clarity. We see Springsteen as a boy (played by Matthew Anthony Pellicano) bullied by his dad (Stephen Graham) in grainy black-and-white footage. We track all the influences on the writing of Nebraska: Springsteen reads Flannery O’Connor, he listens to “Frankie Teardrop” by Suicide, he catches Terrence Malick’s Badlands on TV, he remembers going to see Night of the Hunter with his father and being frightened. For the song “Mansion on the Hill”, we flash back to young Bruce and his sister being shown a mansion on a hill by their father. As he writes the title song, about the Starkweather murders depicted in Badlands, we see him change “he” to “I”, to show how much he owns the story.
The dialogue is no less relentlessly obvious. Landau (Jeremy Strong) describes the Nebraska songs for us to his wife. They’re deeply personal, and, you know, dark, he says. For dramatic interest, we follow Springsteen’s abortive affair with a hometown, single-mum girlfriend, Faye (Odessa Young). “I’m lost here, I’m buried here,” he tells her, breaking it off.
Much of the later part of the film is devoted earnestly to the problem of persuading the record company to release the tape in its simple, raw state. Though Springsteen spirals into breakdown, there’s little sense of jeopardy: viewers will be well aware of his later success. In 1985, Bob Dylan said: “People say to me, ‘When you gonna make a Nebraska album?’ Well, I love that record, but I think I’ve made five or six Nebraska albums, you know.” One of those would surely be 1967’s John Wesley Harding, the originality of which was hailed by the young journalist, Jon Landau.
“Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” is in cinemas now
[Further reading: How to sell priceless stolen jewels]
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This article appears in the 23 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Doom Loop