Springsteen:
Deliver Me From Nowhere

SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE 🎸

When it comes to music biopics, we normally get some combination of the artist’s rise and fall or the ascension to superstardom, but rarely do we get to see the man (or woman) behind the music quite like this.

SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE highlights the buildupto Bruce Springsteen’s award-winning album Nebraska and the issues that plagued him during the strenuous creative process. From long drawn-out meetings with his manager to make sure his work remained authentic and not reproduced for mass appeal to the internal battle of dealing with trauma from his childhood. Bruce Springsteen may be a larger-than-life figure to many, but this film strips him down to his most vulnerable moments, where we witness the tortured relationship he had with his father and the lingering effect that had on his adult life.

As someone who had had depression, I get what telling this story was supposed to mean, yet the mastermind musician that Bruce was felt like an afterthought in comparison to what should’ve been a balancing act of platforming an iconic album to this man’s genius creation.

Once I saw that the director was Scott Cooper, the same director behind Black Mass (the Whitey Bulger story), it began to make a lot more sense. As great as he is at bringing to life real people and visualizing the time period they existed in, there’s something frustratingly flat and muted about his films that makes it hard to be more than surface-level invested in them.

It also doesn’t help that it took a second for me to get over the fact that Jeremy Allen White wasn’t playing Chef Carmy Berzatto from The Bear, which is more of a me problem because his performance was absolutely fine for what the story needed of him. Then there’s Jeremy Strong (Succession), who plays Bruce Landau (Bruce Springsteen’s manager), and he continues to have this incredible ability to make his performances feel so real. It’s the same way I felt after seeing him in The Apprentice (2024), where every line he speaks and every step he takes doesn’t feel scripted, and that’s a skill very few actors have.

The objective of this film seemed to be humanizing Bruce Springsteen, but the humanization ended up feeling cliché because of what parts of the story they chose to focus on. I feel like if I was still depressed, I might’ve felt seen watching a film of a major star who was struggling with what everyday people go through, but because his obsession carried him to greatness and he was so absorbed in his work, it was hard to find a path to feel sympathetic or any emotion towards his deeply personal story.

I don’t know if this is a fair comparison because I think the direction of each movie was vastly different, but as someone who never listened to Bruce Springsteen’s music and also never knew much about Bob Dylan, I'm more intrigued by Dylan’s career than Springsteen’s—which I didn’t think would be the case.

Again, the performances were great, and the movie looked fantastic, but the three major plot points felt like they were at war with one another in a way that made sense for where the man was at in his life but deviated too far away from what people care about—the music.

SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE chooses to lean heavily into the somberness of an artist—and though that may work for those who were fans or alive during that time—others, like myself, who know of him mostly by name, will wait for the music high that never arrives. 

Enjoy!

6.3/10 🍿 🎥

Runtime: 1hr59mins

Where:  In Theatres October 24th

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere Review (2025) The Richmond Reviewer - October 27th, 2025.

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