It’s always interesting seeing movies explore the creative process, such as what Steven Spielberg did recently in The Fabelmans, or larger-scale enterprises like the Oscar-winning Amadeus. But Mozart wasn’t around to give his OK to that particular film. Bruce Springsteen, however, after turning down numerous past attempts and offers, is around to pass judgment on director-writer Scott Cooper‘s anti-biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, which prefers to focus on the man, in a key moment of his life and career creating his sixth studio album Nebraska, as he resisted all commercial temptation to to find himself, and the truth, in his art.
It would seem for a major star, who six years earlier had appeared simultaneously on the covers of Time and Newsweek and had just come off a wildly successful release and tour for his fifth album The River, a bit of a risk. But as this exceptional film shows, it wasn’t a risk to Springsteen: it was a necessity. In this way, Cooper has defiantly not made a so-called biopic, but rather contributed a snapshot in time and a portrait of what drives the creative process — no easy feat even as it has been attempted many times in Hollywood films (some good, some legendarily dishonest). The film had its World Premiere today at the Telluride Film Festival. This one, the first major narrative movie about Springsteen, plays it on its own terms and its own truths, just like The Boss himself did in creating the most unique album of his career in 1981 when, despite appearances, the walls were tumbling down. If some fans go in expecting the equivalent of a greatest hits package, think again. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is the real deal, an intelligent, deliberately paced journey into the soul of an artist. Intriguingly, it has something in common with another film that is playing at Telluride this weekend (and debuted earlier in the week at Venice): Jay Kelly, in which George Clooney leads as a major movie star suddenly questioning his worth, value and identity as a man and as an artist. But that is fictional; Springsteen is real.
With Warren Zane’s 2023 book Deliver Me From Nowhere as its source material, Cooper laser-focuses on a year where Springsteen (played with conviction and authenticity by Jeremy Allen White) was experiencing depression and past trauma, haunted by his late father and unsure how to view encroaching mega success — perhaps feeling unfaithful to and dishonest toward the blue-collar, working-class people who drove his emergence to the pinnacle of fame in the music business.
Against all odds (and certainly the wishes of Columbia Records, which wanted another hit-generating record to follow The River), Springsteen had another idea, as this movie details what inspired Nebraska, including a deep dive into several books, the influence of Terence Malick’s 1973 film Badlands, Flannery O’Connor, the Suicides’ first album and real-life killers Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate among other creative drivers — not exactly the same old, same old. In many ways, it is an album about loneliness, and it seems appropriate that Springsteen was not in the studio with his band for its core recording, rather simply alone in his New Jersey bedroom with an acoustic guitar and a 4-Track recorder where he performed the 10 tracks that would eventually make the playlist, from the title song to “Mansion on a Hill” to “Atlantic City” to “Reason To Believe” — but not some future smashes like “Born in the USA,” “Glory Days,” “I’m on Fire” and more that would be jettisoned to the next album, in the process keeping it about as pure as it gets. Springsteen wouldn’t even allow his photo to appear on the album cover, instead choosing a black-and-white image from the POV of the inside of a car traveling down a desolate highway on a cloudy day.
One of my favorite scenes has Springsteen’s longtime manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) going into Columbia exec Al Teller’s (David Krumholtz) office to explain to him that there will be no press, no singles, no tour and no photo of Bruce for the release of the album. Bruce wants it just out there for people to discover and interpret on their own. The dynamic between the two is worth the price of admission, but as Teller finally agrees to do what they can to support the album, it’s a triumph of artistry over commercialism that in this cold, corporate Donald Trump era some four-plus decades later is hard to imagine going down like that.
The film plays in two eras weaved in and out. Springsteen’s childhood in the ’50s is in black-and-white as we see the stern father, Doug (Stephen Graham), not in line to win dad of the year — a man who comes home and starts drinking — and young Bruce (played nicely by Matthew Pellicano) getting the brunt of his neglect. It clearly wasn’t a happy childhood, thus Cooper and his cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi’s decision to leave out the color. The other part, of course, is the early ’80s and creation of the record, a time where Springsteen, though in a dour state of mind, was also finding romance as seen in the film by the presence of the fictional Faye Romano, meant to represent multiple women in his life at the time and effectively played by Odessa Young. This relationship, though, seems more a convenience for dramatic license, and perhaps deviates a little too much from a film that otherwise feels 100% authentic to the core of Springsteen and his life crisis at this time. It is a minor flaw in an otherwise admirable film.
We also see the importance of Landau in his life and career, a supportive but honest guide who is there every step of the way to keep the wolves out. Others include good friend and guitar tech Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser) and his wonderful mother Adele Springsteen (Gaby Hoffman), even though those roles are underwritten compared to others. Graham, enjoying the biggest success of his career right now with the multi-Emmy nominated Adolescence, could not be better as his father — all his scenes in flashback and filtered through Bruce’s memories. Also impressive is a brief turn by Marc Maron as producer, audio and recording engineer Chuck Plotkin, who had the unenviable task of somehow making those self-recorded 4-Track cuts stand up to the expected quality consumers would expect. It is fascinating to see how he was able to pull it off. And let’s give a big shout-out to casting director Francine Maisler and those who put the band back together — that is, the actors who play the E Street Band.
With his high-profile TV role in The Bear, White has to fight that kind of familiarity and somehow convince us he is one of the greatest rock stars in history at his lowest point ever. Mission accomplished. White, with no prior history in singing or playing guitar, studied for five months with a vocal coach as well as guitar experts. The results speak for themselves. He is utterly convincing on every count, but this is no mere SNL-style imitation. White gets to the essence of the man without copying him, but the transformation is nothing less than stunning, reminding me of what Sissy Spacek was able to accomplish playing Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter, even as, like White, the legend she was playing was very much alive and watching. No pressure there at all, right? Give White props, especially for delivering this moving portrait of Springsteen from nowhere.
Inevitably, there will be comparisons to last year’s Oscar-nominated Bob Dylan film A Complete Unknown, which focused solely on the earliest years of Dylan as channeled through Timothée Chalamet. Almost harder to achieve though is capturing a star much further along and at the crossroads of his career, a crisis point where it just wasn’t in the cards to only “play the hits.” It is watching the birth of a true artist, free now to go his own way and one who is still very much evolving. After more than half a century at it, Springsteen’s “glory days” may be aging, but with the hope of the future informed by his past, he still rocks.
Producers are Cooper, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Eric Robinson and Scott Stuber.
Title: Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
Festival: Telluride
Distributor: 20th Century Studios/Disney
Release date: Oct. 24, 2025
Director-screenwriter: Scott Cooper
Cast: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Steven Graham, Odessa Young, David Krumholtz, Gaby Hoffman, Grace Gummer, Marc Maron, Matthew Pellicano, Harrison Sloan Gilbertson
Running time: 1 hr 54 mins