It is the season of ghost stories. Go to any major multiplex this week and you can find at least three films concerned with ghosts, haunted spaces and haunted heads. Each features people from all walks of life, forced to confront loss made evident by malicious spirits. And in each case, these people engage with ghosts, battling them on both a physical and emotional level despite the increasing toll they take.
In the hope of what? Survival? A better understanding of life and death? Or perhaps because they are called to it?
Of course, we associate these elements with horror. But suppose those elements were approached from another perspective, one absent of horror, but still innately concerned with being haunted. The most surprising ghost story of the season isn’t horror at all, but rather the story of one of America’s great artists wrestling spirits and trying to contain them on a cassette, which serves as its own kind of sacred vessel. In Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, filmmaker Scott Cooper continues to his work of exorcising America’s soul.
As many fans of Bruce Springsteen are aware, the Boss’s sixth studio album, Nebraska (1982) marked a significant departure for the artist. Springsteen’s most personal album was marked by somber, stripped-down tracks recorded in solitude without the E Street Band. While still retaining the blue-collar perspective Springsteen had made a name for himself on, Nebraska was forged from America’s violent past, both real and fictional.
The killer Charles Starkweather, the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, Charles Laughton’s sole cinematic offering, The Night of the Hunter (1955), Terrance Malick’s debut film, Badlands (1973), and Springsteen’s own emotionally fraught childhood each served as inspiration and influence. The story of Nebraska’s composition, recording and release is chronicled in Warren Zanes book, Deliver Me from Nowhere (2023) and Springsteen’s autobiography, Born to Run (2016), which form the basis of Cooper’s film and Jeremy Allen White’s portrayal of the man. Like the album Nebraska, Cooper takes an unconventional approach to Springsteen’s story, making for one of the decade’s most compelling biopics of an artist, and entirely unconcerned with being a crowd-pleaser for the masses.
Deliver Me from Nowhere focuses on Bruce Springsteen in the midst of a depressive episode, struggling to create something meaningful and finite, while suicidal ideation plays discordant sounds in his head. Bruce’s relationship with a waitress, Faye (Odessa Young), is doomed from the start because he can’t love the way he knows she deserves. His past is marred by his childhood desire to protect his mother, Adele (Gabby Hoffman) from his father, Douglas (Stephen Graham) whom he was desperate to receive recognition and love from. And his music career has execs and his manager, Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), eager to help him decide his next move while he’s stuck between who he was and who he’s on the path to becoming.
It’s a fascinating portrait of artistry and the painful, often isolating process of making it. If there’s any point of comparison for Cooper’s film, it would be Love & Mercy (2014) Bill Pohlad’s film centered around Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s attempts to complete the album Smile in the aftermath of a nervous breakdown while dealing with schizophrenia. Is it any wonder why the film is struggling to break out?
Biopics focused on musicians have become a genre onto themselves, complete with their own agreed upon conventions, stylistic choices and narrative beats. These films have always had a place on our screens, though certainly over the last decade they’ve become a more frequent trend. While Ray (2004) and Walk the Line (2005) served as the foundation and formula for musical biopics, the success of Straight Outta Compton (2015), and Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) subsequently proved to studios that they could be major blockbusters as well.
Over the last decade we’ve seen the best and worst of what this genre has to offer, and frequently, even in best cast scenarios, it involves trying to cram the entirety of a person’s life into an under 3-hour runtime, while actors cover or lip-synch their greatest hits with varying levels of convincibility. There’s a reason why Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007) has had the greatest hold of 21st century satirical films. It regains relevancy as soon as the first trailer for a new biopic about a popular musical artist hits, because often, it’s right on point. Most biopics about musicians are pastiche, formulaic, and even when highly entertaining, end up being less informative than a Wikipedia entry. They’re a series of snapshots over changing decades and aesthetics, preluded by some variation of “Dewey Cox has to think about his whole life before he plays.”
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is not that film. While marketing for the feature has focused on Springsteen giving a concert performance, as seen in the trailers, film stills and on the posters, the concert aspect of the movie only accounts for a few minutes of the film’s opening act. Cooper flat-out rejects delivering a flashy, nostalgic vision of the ’80s, complete with all of Springsteen’s greatest hits, to the point where White’s Springsteen catches the opening notes of “Hungry Heart” on the car radio and turns it off in disgust. And in fact, the only moment in the film that straddles Cox, is when Bruce and the E Street Band first record “Born in the U.S.A.” But even that moment of dawning realization, “hey, I think we’ve got something here” from the sound technicians is quickly met with frustration from Springsteen who knows it doesn’t fit with what he wants Nebraska to capture.
What Cooper delivers is a deconstruction of the mythology of the Boss. Rather than seeking to tell Springsteen’s story in larger than life episodes, complete with cameos from a who’s who of musical greats portrayed by various character actors, Deliver Me from Nowhere is focused on the creation of a singular album, and one point in the life of Bruce Springsteen as he tries to reckon with his childhood spent in the presence of his mentally-ill, abusive father, and the angry broken pieces of America, these ghosts unable to move on, that he feels connected to.
These jagged spirits are what Cooper’s filmography are defined by. Crazy Heart (2009), Out of the Furnace (2013), Black Mass (2015), Hostiles (2017), Antlers (2021), and The Pale Blue Eye (2022), which each deconstruct a genre, the redemption drama, the crime saga, the gangster movie, the western, the horror movie, and the detective story and reframe them through the lens of American hardship, of the ghosts of the past set loose within each film’s present events. He is, in my eyes, one of the most quintessential American filmmakers of his generation and there’s a quality he has a filmmaker that is not unlike Arthur Penn when it comes to deconstructing archetypes and focusing on characters who don’t quite have a sense of self but are haunted by a past they can’t reconcile with and a future they can’t fully imagine.
It only makes sense that Cooper should bring meaning to one of the most quintessential American musical artists in the form of a stripped down, character study that isn’t about the hardships of drug abuse, fame, fortune, stalkers, or the break-up of a band, but about the hardship of being alone in a room with, and all due respect to author Paul Tremblay who coined so succinct a phrase, a head full of ghosts, and an empty page.
Battling ghosts means confronting death, and throughout Deliver Me from Nowhere, there are long shots of Springsteen staring at elderly men. Yes, they remind him of his father. But they also remind him of himself, of what he will one day be, and it both frightens and motivates him to the point where he feels he must create something lasting and defining in his lifetime or take his own life. Of course, as the film showcases, the completion of the album wasn’t a cure for his depression and only the first step towards the realization that he needed continual therapy, and to reconcile and forgive his father.
The film’s final message, a post-script reading that Bruce has continued to deal with depression throughout his life, but never without help or hope is sincere in a way that some may find treacly. But it feels poignant and necessary in this age to be confronted with the fact that one of the defining icons of masculinity in America, born well before such emotional openness was taken seriously, is still alive because he sought help in fighting his ghosts, and understood that the exorcism that he needed is an ongoing journey, much in the same way it is for America.
For many people, that’s not the kind of story they want to see about a globally famous rock star. Part of what has made the most successful biopics about musical artists so successful is that they reinforce what their target audiences already know and believe about the artist’s life, greatest success stories, and personal tragedies. In other words, they just play the hits.
There won’t be any special sing-along showings of Deliver Me from Nowhere. No audience members are going to get up and dance in the aisle. But I think Cooper delivers something more meaningful, purposeful and ultimately honest in his story of Springsteen’s creation of Nebraska. Cooper made a film that rejects the conventions of its genre, that is unafraid to be slow and patient in the telling of its narrative, and that wasn’t made to appeal to everyone immediately upon release. In other words, Scott Cooper made a film worthy of the spirit of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.
