- Jeremy Allan White, Stephen Graham, Gaby Hoffman
- October 24th 2025
- 119
- Scott Cooper
Jeremy Allen White plays The Boss in this film about the making of his 1982 acoustic album Nebraska.
In recent years, we have had biopics on musicians like Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse and now it’s Bruce Springsteen’s turn.
Based on Warren Zanes’ book of the same name, Deliver Me From Nowhere follows The Boss as he makes his unexpected acoustic album Nebraska in 1982.
His record label wants him to strike while the iron’s hot and make the most of his rising popularity following his 1980 album The River and his first top-five Billboard hit, Hungry Heart.
But Springsteen isn’t interested in producing more hits and shuns the typical trajectory in order to make a stark, moody album on below-par equipment in his New Jersey bedroom.
Much to the exasperation of his label, the rocker also refuses to release any singles, go on tour or do any press to promote the album.
Some biographical dramas try to cover the entire life story and the main highs and lows, while others focus on a specific chapter.
The Springsteen film falls under the latter, with writer-director Scott Cooper opting to tell a rather niche and isolated story about an album non-fans probably don’t know very well. It also depicts Springsteen’s struggles with his mental health and his romance with Faye (Odessa Young), a fictional character representing several women he dated in the ’80s.
Diehard fans will probably be interested in the story, but those neutral about the rock legend will likely find the subject matter quite dull and unengaging.
There are only two big, well-known hits in the whole film (Born to Run and Born in the U.S.A.) and very few concert scenes, so there’s not much to excite Springsteen newcomers or give them a real sense of how big he was at that time.
It feels as if Cooper assumed everybody knows Springsteen and his discography well, because his film is not particularly insightful. Compared to other music biopics, you come away from Deliver Me From Nowhere not knowing much more about its subject than before.
White doesn’t particularly look or sound like Springsteen but he does a good job of depicting his mental health struggles and quiet, introspective state, which often results in him staring off into the distance constantly.
Jeremy Strong provides solid support as his longtime manager Jon Landau, as does Young as Faye and Stephen Graham as his father Douglas, although the black-and-white flashbacks he appears in are too frequent.
It’s hard to believe that a film about Springsteen would be boring, given his storied life, but this generic biopic somehow manages it.
In cinemas from Friday 24th October.
By Hannah Wales.
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