“I’m just trynna find something real in all the noise,” mumbles Jeremy Allen White, all brooding, ursine intensity as Bruce Springsteen at the heart of Scott Cooper’s new biopic. “You find something real,” reassures Jeremy Strong as his manager Jon Landau, “I’ll deal with the noise.”
“I’m just trynna find something real in all the noise,” mumbles Jeremy Allen White, all brooding, ursine intensity as Bruce Springsteen at the heart of Scott Cooper’s new biopic. “You find something real,” reassures Jeremy Strong as his manager Jon Landau, “I’ll deal with the noise.”
There’s a similar ambition to Deliver Me From Nowhere. Though there are wilder, noisier, more barnstorming chapters in the Springsteen biography, writer-director Cooper asks us to dial down the volume and focus in on the Boss’s quietest, strangest, most revealing episode: the year of 1981-82, when he came off the road in the wake of his first Top 10 hit, rented a shagpile apartment in Colts Neck, New Jersey, and started, in the face of all commercial expectations, to channel eerie, echoplex folk songs about the meanness at the heart of the world.
It’s a bold gambit (faithfully based on Warren Zanes’ deep-dive book), that cuts to the quick of Springsteen’s career, and to the relationship it was founded on. Because, although there’s a perfunctory romance featuring the rather squandered Odessa Young as Faye, the bottle blonde spirit of the Stone Pony, it’s this oddball bromance, between bruised heartland hero and buttoned-up nerd, united in their shared commitment to rock and roll integrity, that’s the real heart of the story.
It’s certainly the strongest part of the film, with the two Jeremys straining sinews and vocal cords (White looks little like Springsteen, but attains an uncanny Bruce-ian roar on an early “Born In The USA”) as they fight off self-doubt, second thoughts, Suicidal freakouts to the sound of “Frankie Teardrop” and interfering label execs. “In this office,” says Strong, as though he’s pledging allegiance to the flag, the republic, mom and apple pie, “we believe in Bruce Springsteen”.
It’s a refreshing change from the usual grifters and slimeballs of on-screen rock management. But Cooper isn’t quite so assured at skirting other familiar hazards of the rock biopic. The film is founded on formative flashbacks to the 1950s, and a grim, black-and-white Stephen Graham as Douglas, the troubled Springsteen patriarch. It settles much too comfortably into the photogenic shortcuts of artistic biography, where every childhood trauma is tied up in the bow of song. And it severely misrepresents the most austere, pitiless album of Springsteen’s career by resolving into tearful hugs, therapy and Sam Cooke’s “The Last Mile Of The Way”.
But there are moments of wonder. Back in Colts Neck, White-Bruce gazes into his busted up Panasonic boombox playing the warped cassette of his home recordings, his songs emerging from the rumble and tape delay, and makes his own breakthrough. “That’s it,” he sighs. “It sounds like the past.”
Read Uncut’s review of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition here
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