SASHA STONE: Springsteen Lashes Out After Biopic Flops.
Who is the movie for? Springsteen fans? Nope, he alienated most of them with his Trump Derangement Syndrome-fueled rants*. Wine moms and resistance libs? Nope, they stopped going to the movies during COVID. Gen-Z would not even know who he was.
His friendship and alliance with Barack Obama and the Democrats meant that he was now part of the ruling class, not the working class, so who was he now? The Democrats took ownership of him, and he did nothing but scream about Trump, even knowing that most of his loyal fans probably voted for Trump. Did he care? Nope.
Not only did Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere flop harder than a wet noodle, but so far, in the awards race, it has all but disappeared. Maybe it will come in with a Best Sound nomination. That’s the best bet at this point.
Read the whole thing, which goes on to discuss Springsteen’s onstage anti-ICE rant during Saturday gig in Red Bank, NJ. This from the Bruce who sang in 1984, “They’re closing down the textile mill ‘cross the railroad tracks. Foreman says, ‘These jobs are going, boys, and they ain’t coming back,’ to your hometown.” As Stone concludes, “Springsteen, more than any other artist, rescued the desperate who had nothing else. He pretended he was one of them, those invisible working-class stiffs no one in American culture really cared about. Now, Trump’s the hero for many of them, and Springsteen is just another screeching lib trapped inside the Doomsday Cult.”
* Miami Steve Van Zandt told the London Times in 2024, “‘When Bruce got vocal behind the Democrats, we probably lost half the audience. There’s nowhere we can’t do business.’ But some places feel like enemy territory now? ‘A little bit, yeah. We’re ten times bigger in Europe. We might play six stadiums in America and sixty in Europe.’”
Not that Van Zandt is eager to mend fences with the Boss’s former base: Steven Van Zandt Is Bruce Springsteen’s Guitarist. He Hates You. He Wants You Dead.