The Bruce Springsteen movie sucked me in with a raw and revealing performance

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere could have been just another copy-and-paste music biopic pumped out of Hollywood – but it has enough heart, truth, and commitment to distinguish itself as one of the better examples.

Jeremy Allen White graduates from TV stardom on The Bear to a truly global audience – including an intimidating sect of superfans – with a commanding lead performance.

And he has convinced me that I, too, now love Bruce Springsteen.

The biopic, which takes place largely between 1981 and ‘82, feels so personal and private to the music icon; it’s the only part of his life he’s agreed to put on the big screen after rejecting movie treatments of his life previously.

And if this is how Springsteen wants and has chosen to be seen, in cinemas from today, then I’m all in.

White gives an incredibly intuitive performance that seems to perfectly match the chart-topper’s vibes, but it’s no imitation act.

He doesn’t look much like him, no matter the brown contact lenses or how carefully they tousle his hair, and neither does he appear to shift the timbre of his speaking voice to sound that much like him, but the essence is undeniably there enough that it doesn’t feel like that would be necessary.

Although boy, when he sings, White unleashes a wonderfully growling and gritty version of Springsteen’s vocals, transmitting his tones triumphantly, while also moving (and sweating) just like him on stage.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (the first word of the film’s title feels like an unnecessary bolt-on forced through by a concerned marketing department) focuses on the making of the rocker’s sixth studio album, Nebraska.

It’s the follow-up to his success with 1980’s The River, which gave Springsteen his first top 10 hit – Hungry Hearts.

But Nebraska, folk inspired and recorded unaccompanied by the E Street Band in his bedroom on a four-track recorder, is the album no one wants but Springsteen – including his close friend and manager, Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong).

Landau observes after his stunned first listen that Springsteen is ‘channelling something deeply personal’, while a record executive slams it as sounding ‘like an accident’.

In fact, he’s all-but recorded a breakdown as he struggles with both his past and present, and the relationships within them.

The mental health crisis Nebraska sparks – or at least runs alongside – in his life makes for a raw film. While die-hard Springsteen fans will be more familiar with this period, which was turned into a book by Warren Zanes that formed the basis of this movie, it’s quite a surprising chapter to choose for a biopic of the working man’s hero behind Born in the USA, Thunder Road and Streets of Philadelphia.

But it’s all the more powerful for it. His father Douglas (Stephen Graham) is a huge force in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, which flits back in time to his childhood and their frequent conflict, with a young Bruce reluctant to fight.

Again, major Springsteen fans will know how formative but difficult their relationship was, so it makes sense it’s such a prominent part of the film.

Graham inspires fear well, alongside a bit of heartbreak in later scenes, always hinting at the turmoil just under the surface.

He and White share some of the film’s most evocative scenes, including one in which I defy your bottom lip to not, at the very least, wobble.

It is, however, slightly jarring to see him in the prosthetics used to show Douglas’s physique in later years.

While there is a romantic interest for Springsteen in Odessa Young’s single mother Fay Romano, a composite character of women in the star’s life at the time, the real love story is that between two male friends, Springsteen and Landau.

It’s a touching portrayal of emotional intimacy between men that we don’t often get to see, with Landau encouraging and protecting Bruce and his vision with great commitment. That includes when he’s presented with every manager’s nightmare scenario of ‘no singles, no tour, no press’ by Springsteen.

We even get to see a full, genuine smile from Strong as Landau, which is in stark contrast to his previous celebrated turns as Trump’s aggressive mentor Roy Cohn in The Apprentice and Kendall Roy in Succession.

While Young does her best in a slightly undefined role as Faye, mainly there to help demonstrate Springsteen’s depression, White’s charisma as Springsteen is undeniable.

But he’s also that humble man of the people who eats at diners, refuses to move out of his home state of New Jersey and has taxi drivers call out to him in the street – he’s impossible not to like, and by capturing some of that authentic Springsteen charm, it makes it difficult to resist Deliver Me From Nowhere too.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere screened at the BFI London Film Festival. It is in UK cinemas from today.

This article was first published on October 16.

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