Publication Date: 10-25-2025

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025) review

Dir. Scott Cooper

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★½

My parents’ disinterest in Bruce Springsteen’s music meant it wasn’t until my college years did I discover the inspiring, poetic qualities of the Boss’ discography. Born in the U.S.A. might as well be a greatest hits record; Born to Run might be the best showcase of Bruce’s E Street Band that ever existed; and even Magic, his mid-aughts release, I find to be one of his most potent with its delicate balance of world-weary pessimism with a flicker of youthful optimism still remaining.

Sparse in its production values, which in turn makes it uncommonly bleak lyricism rise to the forefront, Nebraska might not be my favorite Springsteen album, but it’s one of the most important in his catalog. I’d surmise the making of anyone of his 21 studio albums could be the basis for a good movie, but Nebraska might be atop the list of the best, for the artist synonymous with rock and roll balked at the pressure of labels and associates who encouraged him to follow-up his hit-generating double-album The River with something decisively more commercial. Instead, Bruce, a victim of his own depression and ennui, retreated back to his Colts Neck home, and recorded several dark, ominous ballads about the lives of blue collar workers, boozers, and bad men.

The production of Nebraska is the basis for Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, a standout music biopic at at time when the genre is overcrowded and malnourished. Directed by Scott Cooper — no stranger to both movies about troubled musicians (Crazy Heart) and grim introspective stories (Out of the Furnace) — and based on Warren Zanes’ book of the same name, we follow the Boss for about a yearlong span as he penetrates his psyche and puts himself through the ringer to release his most somber, experimental record yet.

The film begins uneasily in Freehold, NJ circa 1957, where an eight-year-old Springsteen (Matthew Anthony Pellicano) takes a trip with his mother (Gaby Hoffmann) to fetch his drunken father, Dutch (Stephen Graham), from a bar. Later that night, Dutch storms into Bruce’s room and abusively encourages him to box. Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a global superstar had a troubled home-life, the likes of which could only be captured in black and white.

Cut away from that and Bruce (played as an adult by Jeremy Allen White of The Bear) is on the last leg of his The River Tour, which helped make “Hungry Heart” a top 10 hit. Rather than follow up his success with more of the same, Bruce hungers for solitude and something he can’t place. While the record company expects another batch of hits that will catapult him into superstardom, he rents a house in Colts Neck, buys a four-track Portastudio recorder, and records his mental anguish scored to soft, ambient acoustic melodies with the help of Paul Walter Hauser. He’s inspired by movies like Night of the Hunter, Terrance Malick’s Badlands, and the story of spree-killer Charles Starkweather. He also starts a relationship with a young single mother named Faye (Odessa Young), a regular attendee of his Stone Pony concerts, where he belts out covers of songs like Little Richard’s “Lucille.”

Tasked with justifying Bruce’s prolonged absences and cold shoulders to the label is his manager, producer, and close friend Jon Landau (a sagely Jeremy Strong). Landau intensely listens to all of what Bruce tells him and responds with compassion, and saves vocalizing deeper thoughts to his wife (Grace Gummer). “It’s like he’s channeling something deeply personal and dark,” he tells her. After hearing Bruce’s demo, which would become Nebraska, he encourages him to rally the band to help him produce the songs, which disappoints him, as these are not songs that demand a flurry of instrumentation. When listening to the Colts Neck demo, we also hear the earliest iteration of “Born in the U.S.A.” Imagine that song in the tune of, say, “Atlantic City.”

If you care to divide Deliver Me from Nowhere into three distinct acts, the first deals with an artist’s return home and his grappling of the age-old question, “what’s next?,” not just in terms of his career, but his relationship with Faye. Bruce can barely care for himself, let alone someone else as well as a child. The second act involves Bruce’s quest for preserving the bedroom sound of his demo when turning it into an album. It’s here where White’s performance evolves from a leather-jacket-clad Jersey boy into a tortured, anxious man burdened by by his disorganized thoughts. Throughout the movie, White doesn’t seem to emulating Springsteen so much as he is striving to turn in a great performance, one underscored by listening, reacting, and internalizing.

The third act, by far the most profound, shifts focus almost entirely from the music to explore Bruce’s gnawing depression. The reintroduction of his father elicits heavy emotion, as Bruce gets a call from his mother that he’s now off his medication and wandering the streets of Chinatown. Bruce spends the night searching for him, and the late scenes shared between the father-and-son — including one where Bruce attends a theater his father took him to as a child — pack an unexpected wallop. It’s in this section that Bruce is forced to concretize what him and Faye are and what they’re not, and it also leads to a tremendous showcase of Odessa Young’s talents as an actress.

Jeremy Strong is a great actor. That much you probably already know. What you’ll see in Deliver Me from Nowhere is quite possibly his most tender, empathetic performance yet. Strong’s Landau deeply cares for his friend like a life partner, beyond that of an armchair therapist. Strong is so delicate with this role that he doesn’t feel the need to over-react or contort his face in affect. His kind eyes and occasionally warm smile do so much of the heavy-lifting, and it’s mesmerizing.

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is not a movie of needle-drops. Sure, we get the tail-end of Bruce performing “Born to Run” in the early minutes because, yeah, the trailers and TV spots needed something magnetic. We get the band’s rendition of “Born in the U.S.A,” which is a touch gratuitous but at least shows the song’s evolution from its original, downtrodden tone. We basically hear clippings of Nebraska‘s track-list over the course of two hours, but the fragments that we’re afforded seek to serve the film’s brooding mood and Bruce’s spiraling mental decline. Cooper’s film is commendably gritty and unsexy.

Up there with Jersey Boys and Straight Outta Compton as one of the most satisfying musical biopics in the last 10-or-so years, this isn’t the Bruce Springsteen biopic we might’ve expected, but it’s the thoughtful, textured one we deserve.

Starring: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Odessa Young, Stephen Graham, Paul Walter Hauser, Marc Maron, Matthew Anthony Pellicano, David Krumholtz, Gaby Hoffmann, and Grace Gummer. Directed by: Scott Cooper.