Scott Cooper directs brawny films about headcases with big hearts (Out of the Furnace [2013], Hostiles [2017], The Pale Blue Eye [2022]) and his take on music writer Warren Zane's Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska contains those familiar elements wrapped in wonderfully, lyrical moments from a small but important piece of the Boss's life.
In 1981, Springsteen (fighting fit award-winner Jeremy Allen White) is riding the waves of stardom after a string of hit albums. Springsteen is ending a tour with his band in support of the most recent release, The River, and we see them closing a show with Born to Run. This song of rootlessness and rebellion sets the picture's theme, and, it is suggested the nature of the artist's spiritual journey to wholeness.
Springsteen's manager / producer / confidante / guardian angel Jon Landau (the always-welcome award-winner Jeremy Strong) tells The Boss as he sits alone sweating buckets in his dressing room of upcoming promotional and contractual obligations to Columbia Records. Landau, a vitally perceptive person, senses the reclusive Springsteen is showing road-wear. He acquires a rental home for Springsteen away from the city noise where, it is hoped, Springsteen can decompress and begin work on the next record with a trusted engineer (Paul Walter Hauser).
The 30-year-old Springsteen is feeling more that tour fatigue. He is troubled by recurring memories of his childhood and his battling parents, long-suffering Adele and booze-hound Douglas (Gabby Hoffmann and Emmy-winner Stephen Graham of Adolescence). The memories are driving him into dark spaces and he starts to write songs about anger and meanness and entrapment and escape.
At the same time, he finds some respite in the company of an old schoolmate's sister, Faye (Odessa Young), and they begin a romance that neither Springsteen nor the audience expects to last because of what emerges from his past.
Cooper follows these two complementary tracks and, intriguingly, takes the story of a talented performer with an outsize public profile and delivers an affective study of the emotional costs of the creative process, the pain and elation of seeing reality first fail and then succeed in meeting one's very personal vision.
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