Jeremy Allen White in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

Scott Cooper made his feature film debut as a director with 2009’s country music-themed Crazy Heart, and since then he’s built a body of work that is united not by genre but by theme. Cooper addresses American masculinity in many forms and tropes, from Westerns to crime dramas to folk horror to murder mysteries. His work is marked by a lack of bombast, his films are typically quieter and moodier than their genres demand—even backwoods revenge flick Out of the Furnace is steeped in melancholia. His latest film, a biopic of Bruce Springsteen obnoxiously titled Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, applies his signature moodiness and introspection to the rock legend.

Adapted by Cooper from Warren Zanes’ book Deliver Me From Nowhere, the film isn’t quite Walk Hard-levels of “Bruce Springsteen has to think about his whole life before he goes on stage”, but certainly, Bruce is found thinking about his life. Now 30 and a bona fide rock star thanks to the smash success of his album The River, Bruce is coming off a sold-out tour and is under pressure from his record label to deliver more radio-friendly hits. It’s 1981 but the gears of commerce are essentially the same—singles, tours, press, merch. Bruce, however, isn’t feeling it.

Played by a sort of stubbornly unglamorous Jeremy Allen White, Bruce holes up in a house he’s rented in Colt’s Neck, New Jersey, overlooking a picturesque pond. There, he gets super into Terrence Malick’s seminal work, Badlands, about the spree killer Charles Starkweather, and requests his cheerful recording engineer, Mike (Paul Walter Houser, stealing scenes as per usual), bring him a new-fangled contraption: a four-track cassette recorder. Using this highly imperfect machine, Bruce begins recording demos. The songs are dark, haunting, lyrical, and acoustic—not at all the sound of The River. To make things even harder down the road, Bruce insists on running every track through an Echoplex, which adds a haunting quality to his songs, though it also permanently distorts the tape.

While Cooper depicts Bruce’s creative process as synthesizing influences from film, literature (specifically Flannery O’Connor), folk music, and Bruce’s own internal reflection, the film is less concerned with the how than the why. Because while Bruce is holed up in his bedroom in Colt’s Neck writing and recording what will become some of the biggest hits of his career, he is also going through a major depressive episode. Bruce reflects on his difficult relationship with his father (Stephen Graham), a man with his own demons and mental illness. He also attempts to have a relationship with a local girl, Faye (Odessa Young, providing much needed warmth to the film), though you can see in his eyes he knows from the moment they meet that he will disappoint her.

Nowhere hits the major beats of a music biopic but it never pushes toward a grand finale. Cooper’s film is instead meandering, even slow at times, plodding from moment to moment with a thoughtful grace that presents the major influences and shaping forces of Bruce Springsteen’s creative life while simultaneously depicting the listlessness of depression. Mediating all of this is Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), Bruce’s manager and friend. 

Jon is fiercely protective of Bruce’s process and artistic integrity, making it clear to everyone they will simply have to figure out how to realize Bruce’s vision for his new album, Nebraska, when he decides that re-recording his demos in the studio won’t work. (Marc Maron does some great frustrated acting as engineer Chuck Plotkin, who has to turn Bruce’s sh-tty tape into a master recording worthy of release.) He’s also the wall between Bruce and the label, personified by a chummy David Krumholtz as record exec Al Teller, who is plainly horrified to hear Bruce’s deeply uncommercial work but also clearly does not want to alienate his new superstar—especially with the anthemic single “Born in the U.S.A.” still awaiting release.

These forces swirl around Bruce as he wrestles with more intimate demons at home. Grace Gummer has an utterly thankless role as Jon Landau’s wife, Barbara, who listens patiently as Jon frets over his friend and client. You would be right in wondering why they even bother portraying Jon’s wife at all when the role is largely silent and asks so little of Gummer, but she adds a dimension to Bruce’s depression by showing the effect it has on others. Barbara goes from politely concerned to openly worried for her husband, who is absorbing all of Bruce’s darkness. You can see the strain being put on Jon Landau by the tightening of his wife’s frown. 

Nowhere is a deconstruction of the rockstar as a myth of masculinity. In a period of incredible creative endeavor, riding high on success, fame, and wealth, Bruce Springsteen is despondent. A beautiful house, a flashy car, the love of a good woman—none of it alleviates his loneliness. Even writing incredible music—Nebraska is considered a masterpiece, never mind the other Colt’s Neck demos that become hit factory Born in the U.S.A.—isn’t enough to pull Bruce out his depression. He needs, as Jon eventually tells him, “professional help”. The critical moment of Nowhere is Bruce’s naked vulnerability in therapy, the first step out of the darkness that was consuming him. 

Far from presenting Bruce Springsteen as an immutable icon, Nowhere shows him at his most vulnerable. The film is less biopic and more a companion for Nebraska, a fictive making-of that does not seek hagiography, but rather a grand unifying theory of Bruce Springsteen: great art can come from humble circumstances, and depression spares no one. There is no insulating factor to protect Bruce from his depression, it can only be confronted, and that confrontation is not a battle but a never-ending journey. Some may find the film anti-climactic, but that’s the whole point. There is no triumphant moment (re)taking the stage—if anything, performing is Bruce’s way of ignoring his issues. Instead, Deliver Me from Nowhere is a vulnerable portrait of the artist as a not-so-young man, struggling to get his sh-t together before fame and success steamroll him into an unrecognizable caricature of himself.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere will play exclusively in theaters from October 24, 2025. 

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