Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

Scott Cooper's take on the Boss is hopelessly shallow and dull

The music biopic has such a staid and worn formula that it’s defining parody came out all the way back in the early 2000s with Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007). Yet we kept receiving bland and formulaic cradle-to-grave biopics up to the populist Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). It was after that Queen biopic that musical biopics began to experiment, Rocketman (2019) delivered a surrealist musical, Better Man (2024) a hijinks monkey-centered romp, and A Complete Unknown (2024) focused on a narrow, but key timeframe. Thus, the focus on a single album in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (2025) seemed ripe to join these refreshing ranks.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere follows Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) mid-rise to fame, having just completed his “The River” tour in 1981. Instead of following his hit album with another full of bangers and anthems, Bruce instead went down a more reflective and minimalist path. Working alongside long-time producer Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) and amidst a romance with single mother Faye (Odessa Yong), Bruce crafts the acoustic album “Nebraska” as memories of the relationship with his alcoholic father (Stephen Graham) haunt him like a curse (pun for those Bruce fans).

Deliver Me From Nowhere is written and directed by Scott Cooper, adapting the book of the same name by Warren Zanes. Cooper is no stranger to the music-centered drama, having steered Jeff Bridges to an Oscar on Crazy Heart (2009) in his directing debut. Cooper tends to focus on dark subjects; his last two films were Antlers (2021) about the exploitation of the environment and an abused child and The Pale Blue Eye (2022) starring a young Edgar Allan Poe in a murder mystery (and not a Lou Reed biopic sadly). With Deliver Me From Nowhere, Cooper chooses to focus on a fraught and critical time for Springsteen, when his identity as a scruffy small-town aspirant was being compromised by his rise to fame. This leads to a crisis of identity and deep depression.

This setting and choice of Springsteen’s life would seem to be ripe material for a biopic, yet sadly the script of Deliver Me From Nowhere falls into the same face-palming traps of genre tropes and cliches of the music biopic that Walk Hard so brilliantly mocked. There doesn’t seem to be an ounce of refreshing framing of a musician’s life within the film, making its selection of timeframe the only original approach to its subject. The dialogue from Cooper is incredibly blunt, at one point directly telling audiences, through Landau, what this movie is about and why it’s such a big deal. It’s a degree of dumbing-down and hand-holding that is the antithesis to The Boss’s own songs.

Yet even a conventionally structured biopic can prove insightful or fun, but Deliver Me From Nowhere sadly gets pointlessly distracted by the romance between Bruce and the completely fictional Faye. Sure, it’s a metaphor of Bruce struggling to retain his romanticized small-town New Jersey identity, yet the romance is plagued with cliches and cringe-worthy lines. This relationship fills up half the film’s runtime, meaning the deciphering of Bruce and his musical genius is left as a subplot. We get some scenes of Bruce getting inspiration for songs, yet his writing and composing process are shown as seamless streams of perfected melodies, pouring forth on his first guitar strums. Worse than that, many iconic songs are composed and taped completed off-screen, with viewers instead getting the more interesting scene of the demo tapes being delivered instead.

One of the key relationships in Bruce’s life, which helped curate his own voice is Landau. His was the confidence and guiding hand that unlocked Bruce’s genius and artistry. Yet composing and working between the two was a push and pull process, where input and arguing ensued, as with all great collaborative art. The seeds of a movie centered on that fascinating partnership and littered throughout Deliver Me From Nowhere, yet its sadly waylaid for the fictional romance instead. Instead of delving into the conflicting recording sessions, Bruce is shown dictating the exact recording as he sees fit, and his genius shown as an inevitable action. It’s a lazy and frankly naïve way of showcasing the musical process from Cooper, who showed more nuance in Crazy Heart.

The performances do a lot of the heavy lifting in Deliver Me From Nowhere. Not much depth or excitement is given by the script, leading to an unfortunate doldrum to settle around much of the runtime. Allen White has shown he’s a limitless actor on Shameless (2011-2021) and The Bear (2022-), and with Deliver Me From Nowhere, he once again shows an immense talent. Yet, as with any performer embodying an iconic figure (and voice), actors have to choose whether to lean into imitation or into the interiority of a character. Few performers can do both. Yet, with a character like Bruce Springsteen, whose look and voice are so distinct, Allen White is in a tough position, choosing an uncanny imitation in the end. This means that, while fascinating to see Allen White’s impression, it sacrifices an interiority that the script wasn’t providing either. As a result, we get a Bruce Springsteen who sounds and acts as we expect, yet never lets us explore his inner thoughts. By not being able to showcase much complexity, Springsteen comes across as low-energy, which clashes horribly with the eclectic showmanship he’s most known. Strong is solid as Landau, yet given too little screentime; a tragedy given his incredible chemistry with Allen White. The rest of the cast is wasted in cliché roles that are laughable at how generic they are.

In the end, Deliver Me From Nowhere is a disappointing bore of a movie. It’s curious that the closest cinema has gotten to delivering a complex and comprehensive Springsteen biopic was with Blinded by the Light (2019), which is about a British-Indian boy who connects with Springsteen’s music in Luton, England. Cooper delivers a hopelessly generic and shallow biopic as a result. He takes on an intriguing period of the rock icon’s life, but doesn’t bother to delve deeper into the why and how of his subject. Paired with stock dialogue, the wrong relationship put in focus, and a sore lack of musicality, and Deliver Me From Nowhere is the most forgettable Springsteen has ever been.  

5.0/10