Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025)

Jack and I enjoyed this fictionalized retelling of Bruce Springsteen’s creation of his 1982 album Nebraska. In the title role, Jeremy Allen White does his own performing (listen here) after getting voice, guitar, and harmonica coaching. The great cast also includes Jeremy Strong as his manager/producer Jon Landau, Paul Walter Hauser as his best friend Mike, Odessa Young as his girlfriend Faye (an amalgam of women in Springsteen’s life), and Stephen Graham and Gaby Hoffmann as his parents. Though we were excited to see Marc Maron listed as producer/engineer Chuck Plotkin, he had very few lines. Producer Jimmy Iovine appears as himself. Stephen Singer’s part as a psychiatrist is not big but his face is familiar because we’ve seen him in dozens of movies and TV shows.

Director Scott Cooper based his screenplay on the 2023 book Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska by Warren Zanes, plus some elements of Springsteen's 2016 autobiography Born to Run. In the interesting imdb trivia, Cooper calls this an "anti-biopic."

In addition to the Springsteen songs, Lumineers co-founder Jeremiah Fraites has provided a lovely score, available to stream on Apple Music and elsewhere.

After I wrote about White in Afterschool he won a bunch of awards for 39 episodes of The Bear. Strong was last blogged for Armageddon Time, Hauser for The Naked Gun, Young for Shirley, Graham for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Hoffman for C'mon C'mon, Maron as the subject of the documentary Are We Good? and for acting in To Leslie, and Cooper for Crazy Heart (about a fictional musician). This is Iovine's first and Fraites' fifth feature.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics want this picture to stay nowhere, averaging 61%, while its audiences like the delivery better at 82. We watched it on May 19 on Hulu.