Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, 2025. Director: Scott Cooper.
The synopsis of ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere’ is essentially to be found in lines from an early Bruce Springsteen song, ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’:
Well, everybody’s got a secret, Sonny
Something that they just can’t face
Some folks spend their whole lives trying to keep it
They carry it with them every step that they take
‘Til someday they just cut it loose
Cut it loose or let it drag ’em down
Where no one asks any questions
Or looks too long in your face
In the darkness on the edge of town
In the darkness on the edge of town
What Springsteen initially can’t face is his troubled relationship with his troubled father. In the film he is told this to his face by his girlfriend Faye (a composite character, rather than an actual person). Eventually, he leaves New Jersey – his hometown, which triggers memories for him all the time he remains there – and through talking therapies gains necessary understanding of his mental health challenges, including greater understanding of and an improved relationship with his father.
His initial response to the issues he faces, however, is a deep dive into the lives and stories of characters dealing with unresolved guilt. The stories of Flannery O’Connor provide the template that he uses for the telling such stories, as her stories open out into epiphanies revealing core dilemmas and offering an opportunity for both salvation and change.
The stories Springsteen tells require a stripped back presentation without the embellishments of the E-Street Band, who have been his constant companions and accompanists up to this point, providing an optimistic uplift to even the most traumatic of lyrics. As ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ indicates, Springsteen had been writing about the issues with which he had been grappling for some time. On his then-most recent album ‘The River’, he had written about his father on ‘Independence Day’ and had included O’Connor-type stories, including the title track and ‘Wreck on the Highway’.
Now he moved wholly in this direction facing a tussle with his record company as a result because this new style was so different from his original music as to constitute a significant risk of failure in terms of record sales. The extent to which his new music emerged from and reflected his personal struggles meant that Springsteen was resolute in maintaining that the collection required absolute integrity. He was proved right as ‘Nebraska’ was popular on release, reaching No.3 in the US and going Top Ten in many other countries. The film effectively documents the stresses and strains of this period before Springsteen finds personal and artistic redemption and resolution.
The artistic risk he took was undoubtedly great. I was one who loved the album on its release. For me, it engaged me in a way that his earlier music had not to the same extent but I remember talking at the time to a longstanding Springsteen fan for whom this change of direction was probably the worst artistic turn he could have taken. That fan could not, of course, known that ‘Nebraska’ was not a wholesale rejection of Springsteen’s earlier ‘big’ and ‘uplifting’ band music but, instead, a broadening of both the canvas on which he was able to create and of the palette he could use to do so.
‘Nebraska’ was a turning point in terms of Springsteen’s freedom to create across a wider range of styles and forms. In essence, a similar move to the artistic recreations and reimaginings of performers like Bob Dylan and David Bowie, which meant that they could never be typecast and always had freedom to create anew. As a result, ‘Deliver Me from Nowhere’ is to some extent a companion piece to last year’s ‘A Complete Unknown’ about Bob Dylan going electric and the resistance he encountered within the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the time in doing so. Springsteen, in ‘Deliver Me from Nowhere’, takes the reverse journey to that of Dylan – going from electric to acoustic – but to achieve the same end. Springsteen’s journey, however, is more moving and intense because he is so personally invested as a result of dealing with his own mental health issues at the time.
Dylan, by going electric, was essentially maintaining his personal ‘unknowability’ while also reaching for artistic freedom. In ‘A Complete Unknown’, Dylan arrives as an unknown entity – from an obscure town and with a fabricated backstory – and remains unknown, despite massive publicity, by always moving in new directions, most spectacularly when going electric. In ‘Deliver Me from Nowhere’, Springsteen finds himself in an emotional space that feels like nowhere as a result of his mental health issues and fashions a form of release firstly through the story-telling songs of ‘Nebraska’, then through his battle for the release of ‘Nebraska’ in the form he wishes, and finally through his move to LA and the commencement of talking therapies. Throughout, he is supported compellingly by his manager Jon Landau.
While the story told in ‘Deliver Me from Nowhere’ is not as public or as exciting as that told in ‘A Complete Unknown’, it is nevertheless a more intense and honest look at the personal struggles that often underpin artistic development and success than the Dylan biopic. Although Dylan and Springsteen both principally create characters in their songs and tell stories that are not primarily confessional, Springsteen seeks to be more open and emotional in relation to his own state of mind and heart, while Dylan has always sought to confuse and deflect in order to retain a sense of mystery and remain as far as possible unknowable and unknown. These different strategies inform the shape and feel of the two biopics with each delivering a different but not less engaging and though-provoking experience. The deep-dive into mental distress and artistic creation that is at the heart of ‘Deliver Me from Nowhere’ is affecting, engaging, and enlightening.
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Jonathan Evens
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