Other states tried to woo the new biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere away, But in a case of life imitating art imitating life, Bruce would have none of that. My way or the highway, And so director Scott Cooper and the producers got tax incentives from the New Jersey film office to film a story about a hometown hero in his home state. Our film critic, Harlan Jacobson, has more.
HJ: Director Scott Cooper had a hard task in making Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere: how to make a new rocker biopic hits most of the usual notes and arrive at a film that at nearly two hours keeps you inside the frame. He does that though musician and chef stories are everywhere; they’ve shoved other genre characters offscreen to claim the fantasy life of young Americans about a life inside art.
Over the last 20 years there have been lots of musical bio films: from Johnny Cash, to Ray Charles, Little Richard, James Brown, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, Miles Davis, a couple of different Dylans including last year’s A Complete Unknown, Elton John, Aretha Franklin, Bobby Darin, Brian Wilson, Edith Piaf, Freddie Mercury, and Don Shirley in Green Book which won Best Picture in 2018. The genre is largely comforting, framing contemporary issues about class, race and families laced with self and other destruction. They are almost always built on an insistent artistic authenticity that overcomes the opposition of the business, which is always backward-looking to what has already worked. And the developing opposition of the artist to him or herself. The lives of artists invite sympathy. They capture something about being human. And that describes Jersey Bruce to a T.
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere was shot last winter at the frigid Stone Pony, the starting point for Bruce Springsteen in Asbury Park. Any story about Springsteen is by definition a Jersey story. Cooper starts pretty arty here in black and white in Freehold with Springsteen at about 10 in a sad home which later haunts his choices and sense of self in the world. When not drinking and raging at his wife (played by Gaby Hoffman), Bruce’s dad Dutch (played by Stephen Graham coming off his terrific turn as a dad in the four-hour British streaming series, Adolescence) takes his son for what’s supposed to be a father son outing to a Saturday matinee. Only the film is Night of the Hunter, a murderous 1955 masterwork, also in black and white, from which Cooper ups the black humor ante by lifting the sequence of Robert Mitchum catching up to the terrified kids. Dad is clueless. And it’s cinema shorthand to link it to Springsteen’s Nebraska album, about his later adult depression, after he breaks through in 1975 with Born to Run and then Thunder Road, Hungry Heart and his 1980 double album The River.
Springsteen shows up at a nowhere Jersey car lot to reap the spoils: a hot Chevy Camaro Z28. “You deserve a car like this, I know who you are,” says the salesman. “Well that makes one of us,” deadpans Jeremy Allen White in character as a bewildered Bruce, setting up the central project for film. Even a pre-Patty girlfriend, Faye, played empathically as your dream waitress in a diner by Odessa Young, can’t hold the young Springsteen together.
While Jeremy Allen White doesn’t much look like Springsteen, he credibly sings him here.
Cooper based his script on Warren Zane’s Springsteen biography to underline just how thoroughly the rocker’s rocketship left unfinished business behind in Jersey. No matter that Springsteen hits the genre’s predictable skids. He pours that depression into his 1982 spirit flattening album, Nebraska: 10 songs rigged up on a home tape recorder in a cabin in Colt’s Neck: there’s Nebraska, the title song about the Charlie Starkweather murder spree in 1957, Atlantic City about the mob swallowing the future in Jersey, plus eight other just-kill-me-now songs. And he gives his manager/producer, Jon Landau, played by Jeremy Strong, a non-negotiable agenda to take into Walter Yetnikoff, then head of Columbia Records, who wanted another Hungry Heart: he got Nebraska instead with no face on the cover, no tour and no publicity.
The two Jeremys work well together as symbiotic bros who share the vision and the vibe, but they each bring what they’ve perfected in their best known vehicles elsewhere to the Springsteen story: Jeremy Allen White carries over from The Bear, his hit show on Hulu about a perfectionist chef in Chicago taking a working class burger joint into haute cuisine territory. He has that chiseled stare found on Greco-Roman statues, the ones with blank eyes that are unfocused on the middle distance as if some deep thought or feeling has stalled out all forward motion.
And as his business manager, Jon Landau, Jeremy Strong imports his most salient feature from Succession, where everyone of the terrible Roy family -- clones of the Murdoch clan -- said you-know-what-shriveling things to him on his way to stealing the empire, while he remained motionless, ignoring his hair being set on fire atop his frozen, hangdog face -- until he claimed the throne. Time will tell if these two Jeremies have other tricks, but so far they both look born to run here.
