A wish is a dream you speak aloud or whatever that saying is, and today the internet’s wish that Jeremy Allen White plays Bruce Springsteen in a movie because they kinda-sorta look alike comes true as the trailer for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere debuted this morning. It certainly looks like a movie about Bruce Springsteen!
First of all, I hate the title. Deliver Me From Nowhere was a strong title, sticking “Springsteen” in front of it tells me that somebody somewhere panicked that audiences aren’t smart enough to figure out the movie trailer prominently featuring Bruce Springsteen’s music and in which the main character is called “Bruce” and “Boss” is about The Boss, Bruce Springsteen. The Johnny Cash biopic isn’t called Johnny Cash: Walk the Line, ditto for the Bob Dylan biopic, which isn’t titled Bob Dylan: A Complete Unknown. Throwing in “Springsteen” is a level of sweaty this movie does not need.
As for the movie itself, I do love Scott Cooper’s work, and this is a killer cast. Beyond JAW, the film stars Paul Walter Hauser, Jeremy Strong, Stephen Graham, Odessa Young, David Krumholtz, and Marc Maron (can’t help but think he’s ending his podcast at least in part because he’s getting more and more juicy acting roles). And Nebraska, the Springsteen album at the center of the film, is certainly a great album from a great artist, and the story of how artists buck expectations to deliver their best is always fertile ground (see also: A Complete Unknown).
But including Jeremy Strong’s monologue about how Bruce is “fixing the floor” through his new music is very “Dewey Cox has to think about his whole life before he goes on stage”. It’s a fundamental problem for all music biopics—Walk Hard basically ended the ability to make a music biopic without it seeming at least a little cheesy and formulaic, because that film exposed the formula for music biopics so brutally, the entire genre still hasn’t recovered nearly 20 years later. It hasn’t put a dent in the production of music biopics, mind you, it just creates an uphill battle for each new entry into the genre.
The question for Nowhere, as with all post-Walk Hard music biopics, is whether or not the film is strong enough on its own terms to make us forget that comparison. A Complete Unknown, for instance, beats the Dewey Cox allegations, while Bohemian Rhapsody does not. Can Deliver Me From Nowhere separate itself from the specter of Dewey Cox? I like Scott Cooper, Bruce Springsteen, and this cast enough to wish them the best. But the trailer is not convincing.