I’m not sure what I expected, really. Scott Cooper’s directorial output has always been soullessly generic (with the honourable exception of Out of the Furnace), so pairing him with the least creatively interesting genre going – the musician biopic – was always going to result in blandness. What does truly shock, though, with his Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere is that, on top of containing almost no real insight or interesting dialogue, it’s just so damn boring. In telling the story of the creation of Springsteen’s famous stripped-back, from-the-soul album Nebraska, Cooper gives us two hours of, essentially, Jeremy Allen White sitting in a room.
White plays Bruce here in a pretty unremarkable performance – he’s decent enough at the singing, but in moments of dialogue, the only differences between Springsteen and The Bear’s Carmy are the hair colour and the jacket. Combined with the placeholder-quality dialogue, and we get to know almost nothing about The Boss or what makes him creatively tick, even as he obsesses over Terence Malick’s Badlands and the true story behind it. Unlike, say, last year’s A Complete Unknown, itself rather generic but buoyed by its great, high-production value music sequences, Deliver Me From Nowhere doesn’t give us a jukebox of Bruce’s greatest hits to rattle through, and so we’re left with isolated introspection that is not written or acted well enough to interest.
Jeremy Strong barely fares any better as Bruce’s producer/manager Jon Landau, who is given the impossible task of shepherding this difficult album to market without interference from the record companies and while keeping its lo-fi sound intact. All his lines are tailor made to be said out of context in trailers, so they never sound like they’re being said by a proper human, a problem that goes triple for Odessa Young as Faye, an original creation of the film to serve as a surrogate for all Bruce’s failed relationships.
After a lot of very uninspired black-and-white flashbacks to Bruce’s rough childhood to set it up, Deliver Me From Nowhere finally figures out how to be its own film in its literal last scene, a post-show catch-up between him and his mum (played by Gaby Hoffman) and once-abusive dad (Stephen Graham). Suddenly, the dialogue and performances actually spark with something we haven’t seen before, there’s pathos and laughs and then…it all ends. Bruce Springsteen is one of the great lyrical storytellers in modern music; that he ends up with a biopic this anodyne and personality-free is absolutely ludicrous.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 