Be True - the Letters To You review of SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE

October 27, 2025

"...you end up settling for la-la-la lights, camera, action...

=Bruce Springsteen, "Be True"

To start on a truly important and positive note, which of course we should do, some people who see screenwriter-director Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere will learn a bit more about who Bruce Springsteen is, both as an artist and as a person, as well as why Nebraska is one of his greatest albums. They also will learn a bit about how Springsteen struggled with depression and, with the support of his friend and manager Jon Landau, took the courageous step (especially in the 1980s for a guy in his thirties with U.S. working-class roots) of seeking professional help for it. Any movie that might help to encourage others to address their mental-health needs in such a manner certainly can’t be all bad.

Nevertheless, for the most part it's unbelievable - literally! - how fast and loose this film plays with the facts and history of Springsteen’s life and career. And ultimately its emotional and empowering impact is nowhere near that of something like Thom Zimny’s filming of Springsteen on Broadway, or Bruce's autobiography (on which the Broadway show was based, of course,) or either/both of Dave Marsh's biographies, or... (We certainly could go on.)

It's one thing to get the minutiae wrong, like having Springsteen tell the fictionalized daughter of his fictionalized girlfriend that he prefers mustard on his hot dogs when in real life he hates it, or giving Springsteen’s sister Virginia the wrong hair-color in childhood-flashback scenes, or even having Springsteen claim to be thirty-two years old in a scene set about three years after the film’s opening scene, which was set in mid-September of 1981, when at least in real life he already was about to turn... thirty-two. One has to wonder, though, in the face of such easy catches that still got missed, exactly who got paid to research/fact-check Scott Cooper’s script, etc. and exactly how much money got wasted in doing so. But let’s put all of that aside anyway, and focus on the MUCH more important problems here...

One implicit message of the film, whether intended or not, seems to be that before and after he recorded the material that became Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen was “just” a very good rock star making very good rock-star music, but nothing anywhere near the dark, “serious,” and “important” music that is contained on Nebraska. In other words, the hipster-Nebraska mindset goes cinematic, 2025 style. Ugh.

It’s as if before Nebraska he never wrote, recorded, released, and performed equally great, dark, and important material like “Meeting Across The River,” “Adam Raised A Cain,” “Factory,” "Racing in the Street," “Independence Day,” “The River,” “Stolen Car,” “Point Blank,” “Wreck On The Highway,” etc. Or that after it, he didn’t write, record, release, and perform material like “My Hometown,” “Seeds,” “Spare Parts,” “One Step Up,” "Streets of Philadelphia," “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” “My City of Ruins,” “Death To My Hometown,” “Jack of All Trades,” “This Depression,” etc. And while we’re at it, let’s pretty much gloss over the fact that the rock arrangement of “Born in the U.S.A.” - which we see being created onscreen via a somewhat anachronistic reenactment, and first got heard as the title track of his Nebraska follow-up - wasn’t just the “hit-record” version, but it was and remains the best version artistically speaking, directly because of all of those musical fireworks, screaming, and howling. Hands down - and all doltish, sometimes deliberate lyrical distortions and misinterpretations aside - to this day that first-released (and hit) version's arrangement best captures all of the violence, bitterness, and pain at the core of the Vietnam veterans' experiences, and it often got even more intense in concert, as the searing version later captured on Live 1975-85 shows.

This film, by the way, never addresses even incidentally Springsteen’s strong connections to Vietnam vets, which of course deeply inspired "Born in the U.S.A.," and barely acknowledges the important role of the E Street Band - especially Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg - in giving that great rock arrangement of the song all of its power. In fact, nobody playing any of the E Street Band’s members has a single significant line of dialogue in this film, not even in Johnny Cannizzaro’s portrayal of Stevie Van Zandt, who in real life was very likely to have been the first person in Springsteen’s circle to suggest releasing the solo cassette demo-recordings that became Nebraska as Springsteen’s next album.

The other major myth of this film that needs to be busted is that Jon Landau had an uphill struggle with Columbia Records in getting Nebraska to be released in the form and fashion that Bruce Springsteen wanted. Not even Warren Zanes’ Deliver Me From Nowhere book, which was the main source for Cooper’s screenplay and is filled with plenty of silly Nebraska-related myths/inaccuracies of its own, contains this whopper. Zanes’ book makes it crystal-clear that Columbia was very supportive of Nebraska from the beginning, with a quote from Landau himself: “Then Al [Teller, whom Zanes’ book identifies as second-in-command at Columbia, just under the label’s equally supportive then-President, Walter Yetnikoff,] comes in. I hadn’t worked with Al. But I leave Al to listen to [Nebraska.] This guy is going to do operations for me. He says, ‘Jon, I’m gonna tell you two things. One, I don’t understand this record. I don’t even fully understand why an artist would make this record.’ Then he says, ‘Number two, I promise you we’re going to do a beautiful job on it. We’re going to handle this record exactly the way you want. We’re not going to try to make something of it that it’s not.’” Yet in the film’s scenes with Landau interacting with Teller, the makeup/wardrobe crew might as well have provided Teller with an extra-long moustache to twirl, and/or a dunce cap. (By the way, for more on how much strong support Nebraska had at Columbia, click here to check out last Friday's article by Paul Rappaport, if you haven't done so already.)

While it’s unfortunate that David Krumholz got saddled with playing such a one-dimensional version of Al Teller, there still is some very good acting to be found throughout Deliver Me From Nowhere. Making a film about such internalized struggles as depression and anxiety requires a sophisticated lead actor to translate them to the audience authentically, and Jeremy Allen White infuses much of what he brings to his Emmy Award–winning role of Carmy in The Bear: a coiled tension beneath his hangdog eyes and a hunched body heavy with insecurity. On the surface, his handsome features and natural swagger allow him to slip easily into Springsteen’s heeled Western boots and black leather jacket. His sweaty, contorted expressions, confident stance, and gravelly vocals come quite close to Springsteen incarnate, but White’s far more at ease in the quiet scenes of emotional crises. During the concert scenes, his guitar strumming is not always up to par (a difficult task for White, who had never played guitar before.)

Jeremy Strong commands as Jon Landau, the Clark to Springsteen’s Lewis and his ride-or-die manager. Although Landau tends to stay out of the spotlight, anyone who’s heard him speak or seen him move will recognize how completely Strong inhabits him. He walks with purpose and speaks with a calm directness that acts as a supportive beam. In just the subtlest of smiles, Strong conveys a paternal warmth that hugs the frame. It’s destabilizing when his eyes darken with worry and his soft expressions furrow as concern for Bruce’s mental state grows. Jeremy Strong’s performance is so intuitive that you don’t even need the (probably at least somewhat contrived) scenes with Landau’s wife (Grace Gummer,) which feel as if Cooper is bending down to talk to the audience like little kids, spelling out exactly why Bruce feels the way he does.

Scott Cooper also simplifies the creation of Nebraska for the audience, especially those unfamiliar with Bruce’s oeuvre, by alternating between each song and its source of inspiration, putting the artistic process in an all-too-neat bow. (And while Zanes' book already underemphasized the political aspects of Nebraska to a fault, Cooper's film adaptation goes one worse by not exploring at all any political elements of any of Bruce's music.) It is in these song-crafting scenes, however, that Jon Title’s bold sound design flourishes. The bleak sounds of Bruce’s influences overwhelm the soundscape, making you feel as morose as he does. The fire in a scene from Terence Malick’s film Badlands crackles violently while Bruce watches it. When Bruce does research on Malick’s film at the local library, the gears of the microfilm machine click and whirl loudly, punctuated by a heavy thwack when Bruce lands on the words “Nebraska” and “Starkweather,” captured in extreme close-up. Robert Mitchum’s evil laughter and the children’s anguished cries from The Night of the Hunter reverberate through the movie palace. “Frankie Teardrop” by Suicide screeches over the record player, a ten-minute opus in which lead singer Alan Vega monotonously recounts killing his wife and children, eventually devolving into a shattering, primordial scream.

While Springsteen writes his songs, he retreats into childhood flashbacks that are filmed in stark black and white, evoking not only The Night of the Hunter but also some of the key sounds of the Nebraska record itself - desolate, spectral, and melancholic. As young Bruce, Matthew Anthony Pellicano Jr. embodies the “outcast misfit weirdo sissy boy” that in his autobiography the rock star described his younger self as being. Pellicano Jr. holds himself with a delicate fragility, tiptoeing around the minefield that is his overbearing father, taking him in with the haunted intensity of his wide, dark-as-coal eyes. At one point, Pellicano Jr. even replicates the rapid blinking that Bruce was afflicted with as a child.

Stephen Graham, who recently won an Emmy Award as a more caring father figure in Adolescence, plays Bruce’s father Douglas very effectively. He moves through the narrow hallways of his Hollywood-version-of-rundown home like a rhinoceros—all bulky and stilted—almost oblivious to everything around him, preferring silence and nursing a beer alone at the dining room table. Graham’s pensive measuredness prevents him from descending into a villainous stereotype.

Unfortunately, since Cooper chooses to streamline his narrative into a father-son story, Gaby Hoffmann is wasted as Springsteen’s mother Adele, exuding a comforting light but having little to say or do in the few scenes in which she appears. This is particularly disheartening, considering how important she was in Bruce's life, from childhood on. "She got me what I needed," Springsteen said in his speech accepting his 1999 induction into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, "and she protected me and provided for me on a thousand other days and nights... [S]he gave me a sense of work as something that was joyous and that filled you with pride and self-regard, and that committed you to your world." Adele Springsteen should have been a much more significant character in this film, and it's heartbreaking that she isn't.

Neither of the female leads is particularly well-drawn, as evident in the scenes with Bruce Springsteen’s onscreen-only girlfriend Faye (Odessa Young,) a fictionalized patchwork of several former relationships (and, strangely enough, drawn mostly from a relationship that Springsteen had begun and ended even before he ever met his pre-Landau manager Mike Appel, signed with Columbia Records, etc.) In the real-life time-period depicted in the film, Springsteen actually had been dating a Hollywood actress, but apparently this fact didn’t fit the film’s homegrown aesthetic. Young's performance lends Faye a taut friction between wounded toughness, but she cannot elevate the character - a Jersey girl, single mom, and waitress at a diner - from being just a pastiche of the working-class women who populate Springsteen’s songs. Her role is reduced to expository speeches about Bruce’s tendency to run away. Faye’s scenes also allow Scott Cooper to draw on the Americana iconography of Bruce Springsteen’s work and its Jersey Shore specificity: neon-lit diners, a weathered boardwalk, the clang of pinball machines, twinkling carousel lights, and sweeping aerial shots of classic cars cruising down the long, open road.

Ultimately, the film suffers from the double-bind of being too narratively thin for diehards and too abstract for casual fans. Since it depicts a very somber, quiet period in Springsteen’s life, it often resorts to characters explaining Bruce’s feelings more than it shows them, attempting to appeal to those unfamiliar with his autobiography or Broadway show to fill in the details. (Even the song chosen for the closing credits - a live Reunion Tour version of "Atlantic City," mashing up Springsteen & the E Street Band's live performance with more of Jeremy Allen White's vocals - feels much more geared towards trying to appeal to folks most likely to know only the Nebraska track that's gotten the most airplay and appeared on greatest-hits-style compilations, etc., as opposed to ending with a track that actually makes more sense within the context of the issues explored in the film.) Yet those of us who know the book, the show, and other sources are aware that there is so much more from Bruce's personal and family history that could have been mined.

Bruce’s candor about the debilitating effects of depression - and the hope of transcending it - remains one of his greatest achievements. And the film’s most important message remains empowering: No one should feel ashamed of seeking therapy, not even men... not even a handsome devil of a rock star whose life truly was saved by it. It’s just too bad that this message gets delivered in such an unnecessarily clunky and inaccurate way.