ARMOND WHITE: Springsteen’s Self-Mythologizing Home Movie.
As portrayed by perpetual sad sack Jeremy Allen White, curly-haired Bruce labors at a small-town bar, mostly appreciated by lumpenprole clientele and pathetic, clingy, single-mother Fay (Odessa Young). That’s the “Nowhere” from which Bruce longs to be delivered. Escapism drives his professional pursuit that turns uncommercial and derivative. A reckless road trip suggests that he wanted to imitate both Bob Dylan’s storied motorcycle accident and his John Wesley Harding neo-folk album.
Hollywood hack Scott Cooper buys into this myth, undeniably using the shame and dissatisfaction perpetuated by Democrat Party figures Springsteen and Obama. Cooper’s direction and script foolishly erect this myth based on fatuous press-release fiction that Nebraska was inspired by Bruce accidentally catching a TV broadcast of Terrence Malick’s Badlands (a high-art digression from historic tabloid tragedy). We’re meant to accept Bruce’s idiotic approach heroizing serial killer Charles Starkweather as his protagonist — as if Bruce found the secret to all-American failure and misery.
Aiming at our credulousness, Deliver Me repeats the familiar legend that Nebraska was created when Bruce broke away from his E Street Band to compose and perform alone, in his bedroom, to a simple 4-track recorder (lyrics scratched on a notebook next to well-worn pages of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”).
What’s left out is the music industry’s manufacturing of Springsteen’s image. His manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) gets the film’s big scene telling off a Columbia Records executive: “In this office, in my office, we believe in Bruce Springsteen!” This BS shamelessly begs for applause.
Do they obey the laws of thermodynamics as well?
Related: Christian Toto speculates: Boss Bomb? Deliver Me from Nowhere’s Sad Tracking.
Springsteen’s hard-left politics have been chipping away at his brand in recent years. His shocking defense of sky-high ticket prices shredded his blue-collar image. And his chronic attacks on President Donald Trump, while ignoring the serial miscues of his predecessor, likely chased some potential movie goers away.
Springsteen exists in the rarefied air of rock gods. Plus, Hollywood loves cranking out music biopics, witness potential films based on Debbie Harry and Joni Mitchell.
A Springsteen movie should be a must-see event, even one that doesn’t rock the Oscar conversation.
Instead, the film could be out of theaters by Thanksgiving based on current tracking models.
The jury is still out on that, but as “Miami” Steve Van Zandt told the London Times last year, “‘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.’”
