Director - Scott Cooper
Cast - Jeremy Allen White,  Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham, Odessa Young, Gaby Hoffmann, Marc Maron, David Krumholtz
Duration – 119 Minutes
 
In the world of music biopics, it’s easy to go big: stadium shows, meteoric rises, backstage drama. But Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, the contemplative new film from Scott Cooper, goes small — and in doing so, it hits harder than most of its louder predecessors.
 
The film isn’t about fame. It’s about what happens when fame is already yours, and you find yourself staring at a four-track recorder in your childhood bedroom, trying to quiet the noise — not outside, but inside. It’s about Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen’s haunting 1982 acoustic album that stripped away the stadium rock and laid bare a man and his ghosts. It’s also about depression, fatherhood, and the battle between artistic truth and commercial pressure.
 
And yes — Jeremy Allen White becomes Bruce Springsteen.
 
Set in 1981, the story begins after Springsteen’s massively successful tour for The River. Bruce, emotionally and physically drained, retreats to a rented house in New Jersey. He's caught between two versions of himself: the working-class hero the world has crowned “the Boss,” and the uncertain, self-critical son still haunted by an alcoholic father and a sense of spiritual dislocation.
 
We watch as Bruce turns down his own song on the radio, questions who he really is, and disappears into himself. What emerges from that solitude — and from cassette tapes filled with acoustic ballads and bleak true-crime-inspired lyrics — is Nebraska, a career-defining detour that almost never saw the light of day.
 
Jeremy Allen White gives a subtle, inward-looking performance. Known for the explosive chaos of The Bear, he here delivers the inverse: tightly wound silence, the twitch of a jaw, the look of a man who can't stop circling his own mind. It’s not a Springsteen impression; it’s a psychological study. White nails the Boss’s physicality, but more importantly, he captures the doubt, the hesitation, and the unexpected fragility.
 
Equally strong is Jeremy Strong as Jon Landau, Springsteen’s manager and the quiet anchor of the film. Their relationship — part creative partnership, part surrogate brotherhood — becomes the film’s most rewarding thread. Strong plays Landau not as a typical industry handler, but as someone who deeply believes in Bruce even when Bruce doesn’t.
 
There are moments of musical electricity — especially a pulse-raising early take of “Born in the U.S.A.” with the full E Street Band in action — but the film mostly resists rock biopic cliché. Instead, Cooper wisely focuses on the internal: long stretches of quiet, analog solitude as Bruce tracks songs alone, late at night. These scenes are given breathing room, and the 4-track recorder becomes a confessional booth for a man working through trauma, fear, and existential exhaustion.
 
Unfortunately, not everything works. The addition of a fictional romantic subplot with Odessa Young as a single mom named Faye feels like a studio note. It's not a terrible thread — Young brings warmth — but it’s ultimately a narrative detour that distracts from the film’s sharper emotional focus. Similarly, we catch fleeting glimpses of Bruce’s mother (played by Gaby Hoffmann), a major emotional figure in his life, but the film doesn’t explore that bond nearly enough.
 
Still, the missteps are forgivable in a film that takes so many risks. Cooper resists the temptation to glorify or mythologize. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere doesn’t want to be a greatest hits package. It wants to be Nebraska — spare, emotionally raw, and difficult to categorize.
 
This isn’t the Boss’s loudest story, but it might be his most important one. Deliver Me From Nowhere is a portrait of a man searching for something pure — in sound, in life, in himself — and confronting the reality that there might be no clean resolution. It’s more Leonard Cohen than Queen, more Cassette Recorder than Arena Tour. And that’s exactly why it works.