People might have been disappointed if they went in expecting the film to revel in The Boss’s highs. Instead, this biopic – much like how director Scott Cooper portrayed Bad Blake in Crazy Heart – focuses on mostly the lows, the testing times. The lingering pauses and quiet glances carry as much – if not more – weight than the words that are spoken. Amid its nostalgic tone, this isn’t nostalgia in the comforting sense. For Bruce, looking back is tangled with the turbulence of his upbringing – memories that ache as much as they soothe.

To me Deliver Me From Nowhere is a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – to borrow from James Joyce’s title, which I wrote about here back in 2019 in Take a Walk with James Joyce Along the Beach. It’s about the creative process – the songwriting, the spark of inspiration, and the fragility of expression in its purest form. Springsteen had his hands all over this production too, even visiting the shoots, and you can tell he’s long past trying to make himself look good. Instead, he’s intent on telling the truth about that time – raw and unfiltered.

There’s one quiet scene in a café where he’s talking with his manager and good friend, Jon Landau. Oh and get used to seeing Springsteen with his right arm draped across the backrest. Anyhows, he’s being pressured about his next record – the same old talk – when he glances at an elderly man sitting alone in a booth. He keeps looking, as if there’s something profound in that stillness, while the world rushes past. Springsteen sees the beauty in that solitary man – and so does this film.

If there’s a moment that suspends everything else, it’s the scene midway through when Bruce’s father takes him and his sister (the inspiration behind The River) to a Mansion on the Hill – the experience that sparked one of Springsteen’s most hauntingly beautiful tracks, found on his stark and often overlooked album, Nebraska.

Me and my sister, we’d hide out in the tall cornfields
Sit and listen to the mansion on the hill

The echoes of his earlier life – Asbury Park, the county fairs, the Jersey nights – all run through this movie. Maybe not in the songs featured within, but in the small, beautiful moments – like him sneaking himself and his girl onto a carousel late at night, or trudging along the promenade with his collar turned up and hands buried deep in his pockets. That’s the Springsteen I’d always hoped to see – and Scott Cooper captures it strikingly: the world behind the fame, the grit beneath it all. The environment that shaped the music and held him steady on his journey.

Now lets take a short detour here…I’ve read my fair share of reviews of Deliver Me From Nowhere, and what most seem to overlook – or at least not give due credit to – is how powerfully the film unpacks and humanizes the experience of depression. Setting aside the man and his music for a moment, this film stands on its own as a first-person manifestation of what it’s like to live with depression. Speaking from personal experience, it struck me as an accurate and intimate portrayal.

Everything finally comes to a head during Bruce’s road trip to California, where he’s forced to confront himself and admit that the girlfriend he left behind was right all along. I also love how the film handles this moment so subtly – in that road-diner scene where Bruce simply mutters to himself, “She was right.” Faye had told him she wasn’t there just for him to “play house,” calling out his tendency to run whenever things got real. All of this – along with everything else piling up – leads to his nervous breakdown. The movie put me right inside Springsteen’s head, something almost every other music biopic fails to do.

Deliver Me From Nowhere is, quite simply, one of the finest musical biopics I’ve seen. It transported me completely back to that time and place – from the bedroom demos to the studio sessions, from the look of the streets to the sound of the air. It feels more textured, more authentic, than even A Complete Unknown, as much as I admired that film. Still, no one – not Timothée Chalamet, not Jeremy Allen White – can fully capture the raw essence of the original artist’s voice.

That said, both actors deliver wonderful performances, and we as audiences are fortunate to revisit the lives, soundscapes, and landscapes that shaped their journeys – as aforementioned – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.