Deliver Me from Nowhere to where? Asbury Park? The Streets of Philadelphia? Just not 2025 with its AI slop.
The first time I listened to Nebraska, I described it as music to slit your wrists to. (I love Nebraska, to be clear; it’s in my top 5 Bruce Springsteen albums.) I felt in the music that a depressed man recorded the album by himself, in his bedroom, on a cassette tape that never had a case. I didn’t need a film to inform me of this.
You bet your butts I saw Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025) in theater, taking my comrades Julia and Max with me. As a Springsteen head, I knew what the plot would be (even if I have yet to read the book it’s based on). However, with all my fan heart, this film was only good as the emotions were far too beat by beat without enough depth.
Jeremy Allen White’s singing didn’t bother me as it did when I watched the trailer. Maybe it was the theater sound or me accepting a movie is a movie. I thought he did a fantastic job with his body mimicking Bruce’s live singing style. But there were moments, especially long contemplative takes — this is a movie about a man who is depressed, so there were many — where I only saw White.
Jeremy Strong as Bruce’s manager/friend Jon Landau was great and provided some needed levity to Bruce’s depression. Their friendship is a core to anything this film successfully pulls off. I wanted a little more with the E Street Band. The romance was underbaked, and (like the rest of the characters) Odessa Young’s Faye was there only for Bruce’s emotional journey with no agency of her own.
I greatly disliked that they didn’t use Bruce’s own music in the ending emotional beats where he finally goes to therapy and then with his father. While I understand Director Scott Cooper veering away from jukebox musical instincts, many instrumentals could’ve been pulled from Springsteen’s giant catalog instead of schlocky, interchangeable emotional moment movie score.
This film also invoked that feeling of life and creativity before the internet and cellphones. Bruce was entirely unreachable — especially when depression demanded that he refused to answer his landline — except through in person visits and letters curried by those working for Bruce or his record label. A radio silence of magnitudes.
The thing that Bruce captured with Nebraska is uncatchable now. You see it uncatchable then in 1982’s fanciest recording studio, and Marc Maron’s character has to time travel to the oldest vinyl presser he knows to transfer Bruce’s cassette onto a record the old way.
In 2025, giant corporation ruins Nebraska with plagiarism fascist machine that convinces and instructs teenagers on how to kill themselves. Maybe Bruce would’ve asked AI to solve his depression, and he wouldn’t even be here, instead of getting actual help.
In the present, YouTube announced they are to ruin every video hosted there of anything older than like 2 years with AI because they want to. They’re already secretly and without permission editing people’s videos with AI.
My favorite artists sound great live, and many have something uncatchable by studio recordings. Not by auto-tune. Not by slick machines. Not by mixes that sound more like they’re for algorithms than humans. Certainly not by whatever soulless so-called perfection AI offers. Bruce’s creative vision was correct. Art captures a moment. Art is only human, flaws and all. “Don’t need to be perfect. I want it to feel like I’m in the room by myself,” White says as Bruce in the film.
I’m not sure these are all the things Cooper expected me to think about during his film. (I also worried Young’s bright red lipstick would end up on her teeth, and perhaps that would’ve been more realistic.) But that’s what happens when your mind wonders and there’s a creep of a time previously when — if you were one of the most famous cishet white male rockstars in the US — you could hide away in a house in rural New Jersey, leave the landline off the hook, and record in your bedroom, on a case less cassette tape, one of the greatest albums that rocketed to #3 in the Billboards with no singles, no press, and no tour, because you’re the Boss.
Blinded By the Light (2019) remains my favorite about Springsteen film because it better shows the power of his music. As the character Roops says, “Bruce is the direct line to all that’s true in this shitty world.” But I’m not mad about Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere.
Go to therapy! Especially you, men! Also, listen to Nebraska 82: The Expanded Edition as it slaps!