‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ Review: Jeremy Allen White Captures The Boss With Raw, Haunting Intensity

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Oct 2

Written By Jonathan P. Moustakas

Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in 20th Century Studios' SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios

Jeremy Allen White vanishes into The Boss, capturing the fragility, brilliance, and loneliness behind the making of Nebraska

There are music biopics that want to mythologize, to sweep audiences up in familiar hits, to reduce artists’ lives to highlight reels and tragedies. Then there are films like Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, which strip away everything we think we know about an icon and dare to look at the quiet, fragile, and often terrifying space between triumphs. Scott Cooper’s new film, adapted from Warren Zanes’ book and made with Bruce Springsteen’s involvement, is one of the most intimate biographical dramas in recent memory — a contemplative, intricately constructed portrait of a man not at the height of his powers, but at the moment he nearly collapsed under the weight of them.

The film zeroes in on 1982, when Springsteen was 32 years old and at a crossroads. Coming off the massive global success of The River tour, his star had never burned brighter. But instead of charging into another album of stadium anthems, he retreated. What emerged was Nebraska, a lo-fi, bleak, haunting collection of songs recorded alone on a four-track in his bedroom — a work inspired as much by Flannery O’Connor and Terrence Malick’s Badlands as by Springsteen’s own bruised past. This was not what Columbia Records wanted. It was not what fans expected. And it was not the kind of record that made sense from a man poised to become the biggest rock star in America. But it was the record Bruce needed to make to survive himself.

The challenge of portraying Springsteen at this moment is formidable. Jeremy Allen White does not resemble Bruce, at least not in any superficial sense. Yet within minutes of the film beginning, the resemblance becomes uncanny — not in appearance, but in essence. White captures the raspy, smoke-scorched cadence of Bruce’s voice, the way his body seems both coiled with energy and weighted by invisible burdens, the small, precise mannerisms of a man who speaks through music more easily than words. His performance is deeply internalized, marked by silence, hunched shoulders, darting eyes, and the unspoken heaviness of someone carrying both his father’s legacy and his own fear of failure. White wears Springsteen’s essence like a second skin, and it’s extraordinary to watch. Reportedly, he even wore some of Springsteen’s real clothes for the shoot — a costume choice that feels almost talismanic, as if the fabric itself helped anchor the performance.

The specter haunting Deliver Me From Nowhere is Doug Springsteen, Bruce’s father, played with terrifying volatility by Stephen Graham. Doug was an abusive man, a heavy drinker prone to violent mood swings, and the film makes clear that Bruce’s greatest fear was not professional failure, but inheriting his father’s demons. In textured black-and-white flashbacks shot by cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi, we see young Bruce (Matthew Anthony Pellicano Jr.) enduring that household: watching The Night of the Hunter with his father, flinching at outbursts, finding moments of fragile warmth with his protective mother Adele (Gaby Hoffman). These sequences are not presented as explanatory melodrama but as emotional echoes bleeding into Bruce’s present, reminders that the Nebraska songs were less about imagined characters and more about the ghosts of his own childhood.

(L-R) Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen and Jeremy Strong as Jon Landau in 20th Century Studios' SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE. **Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2025**

The relationship with his manager, Jon Landau, provides another emotional anchor. Jeremy Strong plays Landau with remarkable restraint — a performance so quiet it might seem simple, until you notice how carefully it’s calibrated. Strong’s Landau is a man who has given his life to stewarding Bruce’s career, who knows his genius but also fears the darkness consuming him. In one of the film’s most piercing moments, he tells his wife that the songs Bruce is writing are too dark, too guilt-ridden, too disturbing — and that he doesn’t know how to help his friend. Later, he tells Bruce directly, “You’re afraid of what’s coming. Of how big it can get. It’s eating you alive.” In that line is the film’s central thesis: that success, at the highest level, is not just exhilarating but terrifying, a force that can hollow out everything else in its path.

Cooper’s film never lets us forget the cultural ground from which Bruce rose. The Asbury Park streets, the Stone Pony bar, the diners and dive clubs — all are rendered with tactile authenticity. When Bruce wanders back into these spaces, it’s less nostalgia than estrangement. He belongs, but he doesn’t belong. “The Boss” is both armor and mask, a persona that connects him to thousands on stage but isolates him in life. Scenes with Odessa Young’s Faye, a single mother and waitress, underline this tension. Their relationship is tender but doomed; Bruce can flirt, can perform intimacy, but when it comes to sustaining it, he retreats. The mask always slips back into place.

A scene from 20th Century Studios' SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE. **Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios.**

Much of the film centers on the solitary recording of Nebraska. Cooper is wise not to over-dramatize it. We simply watch White in that Colts Neck rental house, hunched over the four-track recorder, laying down “Atlantic City,” “Highway Patrolman,” “Reason to Believe” — songs stripped to their barest essence, haunted by silence. Paul Walter Hauser is shaggy and endearing as Mike Batlan, Bruce’s guitar tech and only companion in those sessions. When the tapes are taken to the Power Station in New York, the E Street Band’s power overwhelms them. Bruce bristles. Marc Maron, terrific as engineer Chuck Plotkin, spars with him over fidelity and sound. Columbia executives fume. “He’s putting out a fucking folk album?!” David Krumholtz’s Al Teller roars. But Bruce holds firm. Nebraska, with all its imperfections, was not just a record. It was a lifeline.

The film is as much about silence as it is about music. Jeremy Allen White spends long stretches alone, not talking, just walking, staring, scribbling. Cooper leans into this, resisting the temptation to flood the movie with greatest hits. Yes, there are exhilarating bursts of performance — a “Born to Run” interlude that briefly shakes the film awake — but the real power lies in the solitary moments, when Bruce runs from family, from friends, from society, retreating into the music that might save him.

Jeremy Strong as Jon Landau in 20th Century Studios' SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE. **Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2025 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.**

The supporting cast adds richness at the margins. Hoffman is heartbreaking as Adele, loving her husband despite everything. Graham gives Doug flashes of vulnerability that complicate his cruelty. Young brings warmth to a subplot that could have felt extraneous, grounding Bruce’s isolation in a fleeting chance at connection. Strong, as Landau, is a study in loyalty and impotence, his every glance filled with the weight of decades of friendship. Even smaller roles — Marc Maron, David Krumholtz, Grace Gummer — add texture to this web of people orbiting Bruce’s solitude.

The costumes, by Mark Bridges, deserve special mention. White wears Springsteen’s flannels, leather jackets, and jeans with an authenticity that feels lived-in rather than costumed. For fans who have seen Springsteen in concert, the effect is uncanny. Combined with Takayanagi’s grainy visuals and Nicholas Britell’s melancholy score, the film creates a world that feels both period-accurate and timeless, a dreamlike reconstruction of a man’s inner landscape.

The emotional climax comes not with a song, but with silence. In therapy, Bruce finally breaks. White’s breakdown is devastating — no words, just sobs, gasps, a body surrendering to the weight it has carried. It’s a moment of catharsis not just for the character, but for the audience. We realize that Nebraska was not just an album. It was an exorcism.

What makes Deliver Me From Nowhere so striking is its refusal to mythologize. It doesn’t tell us Bruce is a hero. It doesn’t canonize the songs. It doesn’t treat Nebraska as inevitable genius. It treats it as fragile, tenuous, a product of one man’s battle with depression, with his past, with his father, with himself. The film’s pitfalls — its indulgent silences, its refusal to entertain with familiar anthems — feel intentional, mirroring Bruce’s own rejection of what was expected of him.

Jeremy Allen White is revelatory. Jeremy Strong is quietly devastating. Stephen Graham and Gaby Hoffman are bruised and brilliant. Scott Cooper directs with restraint, with respect, with an almost documentary-like patience. The result is a film that feels less like a music biopic than like a companion piece to the record itself: raw, sparse, haunting, deeply personal.

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There are a hundred films that could be made about Bruce Springsteen’s life. This one, about the making of Nebraska, might be the most essential. It reminds us that greatness often comes not from triumph but from fragility — from a man, alone, in a room, with a guitar, trying to make sense of his own darkness.

Jeremy Allen White doesn’t just play Bruce Springsteen. He becomes him, in all his loneliness, fear, and fragile brilliance. And Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere becomes not just a movie about an album, but a movie about the cost of survival.

Rating: ★★★★½

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

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That’s a Wrap

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Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere | That’s a Wrap |

“Jeremy Allen White delivers a transformative performance in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere — a raw, haunting portrait of an artist at his breaking point, and a reminder that the music that saves us is often born in the darkest rooms.”

— Jonathan P. Moustakas

CREDITS

Screened: September 28, 2025, NYFF63, Alice Tully Hall

Cast: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Stephen Graham, Odessa Young, Gaby Hoffman

Director: Scott Cooper

Screenwriter: Scott Cooper, based on Warren Zanes’ book

Rerlease Date: Friday, October 24 | 20th Century Studios

Rating: R