Bruce Springsteen has never been an easy figure to pin down — a rock icon whose myth is built as much on introspection and melancholy as it is on bombast and arena chants. Deliver Me From Nowhere, the upcoming biopic from director Scott Cooper, leans hard into that shadow, offering not a sweeping career retrospective, but a focused, quiet meditation on the Boss during his most raw and uncertain era: the making of 1982’s Nebraska.
Jeremy Allen White, still riding high from the simmering tension he brings to The Bear, steps into Springsteen’s well-worn boots. The trailer teases a performance rooted more in mood than mimicry. He doesn’t deliver a caricature — he inhabits the weariness, the self-doubt, and the blue-collar poetry that made Nebraska such an outlier in Springsteen’s discography. “Well, that makes one of us,” he mutters in response to a compliment about his fame. It’s a stark, unflashy moment — and one that already feels miles from the typical biopic sheen.
Cooper, adapting Warren Zanes’ book of the same name, directs with a reverence for the myth and a sensitivity for the man. This isn’t a jukebox parade of hits; it’s a psychological excavation of a period where Springsteen, post-The River, stripped everything down to a four-track recorder and sang into the void. Flashbacks — including a poignant subplot with a young Bruce and his father, played by Stephen Graham — further unspool the personal demons behind the tape hiss.
Backing White is a sharp supporting cast: Jeremy Strong as manager Jon Landau, Paul Walter Hauser as loyal guitar tech Mike Batlan, and Odessa Young as Faye, a romantic anchor in a restless life. Each feels less like a cast of characters and more like fragments orbiting an artist on the brink.
For those expecting Born in the U.S.A.‘s fist-pumping iconography, this might feel too muted. But Deliver Me From Nowhere doesn’t want to mythologize Bruce Springsteen. It wants to find the man who sat alone in a bedroom and wrote State Trooper, Atlantic City, and My Father’s House. And that’s where the real electricity is.
