‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ review: Jeremy Allen White impresses as iconic musician

Dir: Scott Cooper. US. 2025. 120mins

Chronicling a crucial career pivot for Bruce Springsteen in which he walked away from rising stardom to record an intimate album of sombre acoustic songs, Deliver Me From Nowhere works best as a portrait of an artist reinventing himself. Jeremy Allen White convincingly captures the iconic American musician’s tender masculinity and appealing sincerity, singing Springsteen’s hushed tunes with utter authority. But less successful is writer-director Scott Cooper’s attempt to unpack the profound depression and disillusionment which inspired that risky, groundbreaking album. 

The picture affirms the Nebraska album’s stature without shedding much light on the man who brought it to life

Deliver Me From Nowhere hits UK and US theatres on October 24, hoping to follow in the footsteps of other recent music biopics such as Bohemian Rhapsody ($911m worldwide) and A Complete Unknown ($141m). Springsteen’s continued popularity should help ticket sales, especially among older viewers. And certainly Deliver Me From Nowhere will drum up interest in his 1982 album Nebraska, which is the film’s central focus.

White plays Springsteen in the early 1980s as he completes another massive tour. His label anxiously awaits his next record, believing it could propel him to superstardom. But Springsteen feels disconnected from his roots, renting a house in his home state of New Jersey and trying to return to a quieter life, which he finds difficult to do after all his acclaim. Instead of focusing on hit singles, he starts writing stark acoustic songs partly inspired by his traumatic childhood with his abusive father (Stephen Graham). With the backing of his loyal manager and friend Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), Springsteen relentlessly pursues his muse, even if the resulting album may jeopardise his meteoric rise.

The film is based on author and musician Warren Zanes’ 2023 book, which contextualised the gamble Springsteen took releasing a defiantly un-commercial album in the aftermath of his blockbuster 1980 record The River. Adapting this story for the big screen, Cooper (Crazy Heart, Out Of The Furnace) clearly has an affinity for Springsteen, who like the filmmaker emphasises narratives about everyday people told with earnestness and authenticity.

White expertly mimics Springsteen’s muscular singing style, but he also conveys the performer’s romantic soul and restless demeanour, especially once he gets off the road and has to confront his past. Springsteen starts dating a local waitress, Faye (Odessa Young), who is raising her young daughter on her own, but though the two characters share a sweet rapport, White hints at the storm clouds within Springsteen that make it hard for him to commit to anything beyond his art. Springsteen doesn’t want to hurt Faye — who is a composite character created for the film — but the demons inside him can only be exorcised by putting pen to paper.

Ardent fans will be familiar with Deliver Me From Nowhere’s basic narrative, but even so there are ample pleasures in watching this consummate rock star retreat to his bedroom, grab an acoustic guitar, and use a simple four-track recorder to lay down grim sagas of serial killers, broken homes and two-bit criminals. Cooper weaves into the story some of Nebraska’s legendary influences — including Terrence Malick’s 1973 debut Badlands, which obsessed Springsteen — but Deliver Me From Nowhere posits that it was the songwriter’s frayed relationship with his father that most shaped the album. Incorporating dramatically strained black-and-white flashbacks that present snippets of Springsteen’s childhood, Cooper reduces those painful memories to biopic cliches — a superficial obstacle that our hero will predictably transform into brilliant songs.

As a result, the picture affirms Nebraska’s stature without shedding much light on the man who brought it to life. When Springsteen spends time with Landau, Deliver Me From Nowhere is on firm ground exploring the script’s most complex and touching love story. Strong plays this sympathetic manager as someone who knows his client well, able to coax him out of an emotional tailspin or cheer him on to greater heights. By comparison, Springsteen’s courtship of Faye feels underdeveloped and, even worse, a feeble means to awkwardly illustrate his need to fundamentally change himself.

Much like Nebraska was a risk for Springsteen, who (at least temporarily) turned his back on the charts to make something that felt honest, Deliver Me From Nowhere daringly zooms in on a period in its subject’s discography that is not as vaunted. (The record after Nebraska, Born In The U.S.A., would be the biggest of his life.) Cooper deserves credit for honouring the purity of Nebraska’s poetically direct tunes — and the sensitive personal inventory it provoked in its creator. But where Bruce Springsteen at his best has located the quiet humanity within his stadium-shaking music, Deliver Me From Nowhere too often mythologises its subject during a moment in his career when he was wisely trying to strip the artifice away.