by Hudson Moura
Scott Cooper’s SPRINGSTEEN: Deliver Me from Nowhere sets itself a clean, compelling brief: track the making of Nebraska, the spare 1982 album that reset Bruce Springsteen’s artistry. The film has the craft to honor that ambition—handsome monochrome interludes (Freehold, 1957), richly textured period work (New York, 1981; rural New Jersey hideaway), and a cinematography that makes the ’50s and early ’80s feel palpably lived-in. But form never quite finds function. The structure drifts between impressionistic childhood flashbacks and process scenes without a shaping idea to bind them; melancholy becomes the default mood rather than the product of accumulating insight.
The opening signals the problem. A black-and-white vignette of a boy, his mother at home, his abusive father at the bar around the corner, primes us for a conventional biopic arc the film claims not to be pursuing. When the narrative pivots to an isolated house—a family property—the film withholds clarity. We understand that Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) is chasing a sound, a feeling, a way to pare back; we less often understand how he is doing it. As a portrait of artistic labor, the piece is curiously under-procedural.
The exceptions prove the rule. A sequence in which Bruce watches a Starkweather-inspired film on TV—Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in Terrence Malick’s Badlands flickering in the dark—ties directly to the song that will become “Nebraska.” Here the movie briefly clicks: influence, memory, and composition braid into a discernible line. Later, the film stages an approach from the Taxi Driver screenwriter, Paul Schrader, to write a new song (folded into the film as a first iteration of “Born in the U.S.A.”), but the dramaturgy skips the craft—the drafts, the false starts, the sonic choices—in favor of end product. We hear the song; we rarely see the song being made. That asymmetry leaves the creative process uneven—vivid for one track, schematic or opaque for others.
Performance and writing don’t fully bridge the gaps. White’s presence is watchful and inward, but the script gives him too many gestures of mood and too few decisions; he often appears to be carrying the film’s sadness rather than discovering it. Jeremy Strong’s Jon Landau serves chiefly as ballast—equal parts industry pragmatism and managerial care—without materially advancing the plot. Odessa Young’s Faye, introduced through Bruce’s return to New Jersey and rekindled friendships, suggests an avenue toward emotional accountability (especially in scenes with her daughter, Haley) that the film doesn’t follow. Dialogue trends flat and functional, less a ledger of thought than a series of pivots to the next tableau.
What remains is an atmosphere: depression, fatigue, restless pacing, the ache of a man trying to strip away his arena-rock armor to write something small and true. That atmosphere has integrity—and the production design sustains it with tact: battered wood, winter light, analog gear humming in the background. Yet a film about making an astonishing record cannot subsist on mood alone. We need the turns: the choice of a cassette recorder over the studio; the moment a lyric drops a mask; the fight with an industry that wants a different Bruce. The movie gestures at those conflicts but rarely stages them, and when the album finally exists, there is no sense of arrival—no articulation of what was risked and what was won. As drama, the arc lacks a climax; as criticism, it lacks a thesis.
To its credit, Cooper’s team recreates periods beautifully; the photography is remarkable, down to the grain that separates then from now. But the film often feels made for fans, not because it panders, but because it assumes recognition will supply meaning: if you know the discography, you can graft your own connective tissue; if you don’t, you may wonder whose song you’re hearing, why this scene matters, where the process is headed. The result is a movie that circles an album’s aura without cracking its method. 
2.5/5