The latest poster for “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” features a painting of Bruce Springsteen in concert, viewed from the side, his index finger held high in the air. If you examine his face, you’ll see that it looks a lot more like Bruce than it does like Jeremy Allen White, the actor who plays him. You can understand why: Jeremy Allen White doesn’t look very much like Springsteen. (There’s a touch of last-minute desperation to that poster.) The lack of an acute resemblance isn’t fatal in a biopic, but it’s one of a number of things about “Deliver Me from Nowhere” that just feel…off.
Another disarming detail is the aha moment when Bruce first gets the idea for “Nebraska” by catching “Badlands” on TV. In a way, it makes sense — the album’s title track will be told from the point-of-view of Charles Starkweather, the sociopathic killer who’s the antihero of Terrence Malick’s famous film. What’s odd about the scene is that three years before it takes place, back in 1978, Springsteen released “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” an album whose greatest song was … “Badlands.” (It was always clear that title was a nod to the movie.)
That said, the pivotal thing that feels off about “Deliver Me from Evil” is “Nebraska” itself. I can’t even talk about this without being accused of blasphemy, because there is such a mystique surrounding that album, in all its lo-fi acoustic demo-with-reverb Dylan-meets-Suicide dark-heart-of-America austerity. No one ever deviates from calling “Nebraska” a “masterpiece” and one of Bruce’s greatest records. The album is one of the dour sacred cows of music criticism, right up there with such landmarks of anhedonia as “White Light/White Heat” and “Unknown Pleasures.” At the time of its release, Greil Marcus, writing about it as if he was adding a chapter to his seminal book “Mystery Train,” called it “the most convincing statement of resistance and refusal that Ronald Reagan’s USA has yet elicited, from any artist or any politician.” Marcus set the template for viewing “Nebraska” as a political album, and that was embodied in its stripped-down aesthetic, its whole Bruce-vs.-the-overblown-music-industry aura.
There’s just one problem. (Blasphemy alert!) “Nebraska” is an arid art film of an album — poetic to a fault, with a couple of good songs, like the title track and “Atlantic City,” but I’ve always found it to be a piece of dusty folk-rock wallpaper. It you love it, fine, but my point is that whatever claims of greatness are made for the record, they have almost nothing to do with what people have loved about Bruce Sprinsteen for 50 years. His music is deep, and yes it can be dark, but mostly Bruce, as an artist, radiates rock ‘n’ roll joy. And that’s the quality that’s perversely missing from “Deliver Me from Nowhere.”
At home, when I’m making dinner with my daughters, we always play music, and mixed in with the new stuff I like to give them a dose of music history, so I’ll play everything from Nina Simone to Steely Dan to the Clash to ELO to Dylan to the Spinners to the Ramones. But the one time I put on “Nebraska,” we were four tracks into it when Sadie, who is 13, looked at me with a wince of pain and said, “Can we play something else?” She had never said that before, and I was amused to see her reaction directly echoed in the movie by the Columbia Records executive Al Teller (David Krumholtz), who hears a couple of minutes of the record and then says can you please take it off. It’s not just that the album “isn’t commercial.” For many of us, there’s a punishing monotony to “Nebraska.”
The album, in its way, is all about pain, and “Deliver Me from Nowhere” captures how creating the record all by himself in his New Jersey bedroom was therapy for Bruce. That’s a moderately interesting chapter in the larger Bruce saga, and when he actually goes to therapy, the film treats it as cataclysmic — as if millions of us haven’t been there, and as if he was the first rock celebrity who ever walked into a shrink’s office.
The core issue the Bruce of the film is dealing with is the trauma inflicted upon him as a boy by his hard-drinking, abusive, ’50s-macho father (Stephen Graham), who he was desperate to please. “Deliver Me from Nowhere” is supposed to be about the schism in Bruce’s soul, and about how he used the making of “Nebraska” to heal it. But I have another interpretation of what the album means. The myth of greatness that has surrounded “Nebraska” for 43 years, propped up by the music-critic establishment and by Bruce himself (who has said it’s the work of his he feels closest to), is that what matters on the record isn’t so much the music (its bare-bones country vibe, all those goddamn major chords) but the lyrics, which strain at every turn to be badlands poetry. Yet I would suggest that in trying to make a rock album this doggedly artistic and severely high-minded, an album “pure” enough to make Bob Dylan look schmaltzy, Bruce was playing out his demons in a different way. He still had a primal need to please and impress his father, and that’s what “Nebraska” was about. He wanted what this movie gives him: not his due, but a gold star.
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From Variety US