Well, baby, everything dies, that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
–Atlantic City, Bruce Springsteen
For many years, I had a framed album of Nebraska on my wall. It was in one of those affordable black frames designed just for albums. The stark black and white image of a car heading down a road with no obvious destination, coupled with the bold red typeface, really popped when you walked into the room. It’s not my favorite Springsteen album, but it may well be his most important. It was the work the artist needed to create to move forward, to move anywhere. All those years of trying to make it, paying homage to his heroes (Dylan, Phil Spector, countless R&B artists) had allowed Springsteen to look out more than in, but the chickens always come home to roost. Nebraska is an album about dealing with the chickens, or at least the “Chicken Man.”
Springsteen had gone from starving musician to the covers of Time and Newsweek when Born to Run was released, and was coming off his first number one album, The River, which contained his first top ten single (Hungry Heart). All the recording and roadrunning had depleted Springsteen and left him asking the most essential of all questions: “Who am I?”Nebraska is the sound of a man trying like hell to figure it out. Alone.
Early in Deliver Me From Nowhere (sturdily directed by Scott Cooper), Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) can be seen buying his first new car and questioning if it’s “too flashy” for him. The car salesman looks at Bruce through the driver’s side window and tells him it’s a good car for a rock star, stating, “I know who you are.” Springsteen replies, “That makes one of us.” It’s a basic line of dialogue, but said so perfectly by Jeremy Allen White that you begin to understand what you’re in for.
Bruce Springsteen grew up in a home with too much alcohol, too much shouting, and too much fear. That does something to a child. Deliver Me From Nowhere reveals things we may already know: that childhood trauma creates broken men who suffer too much and ask for too little help. Much of the film revolves around Springsteen’s struggle to muster the courage to ask for that help. The records he loves, the films that inspired Nebraska (particularly Night of the Hunter and Badlands), and the music he makes are not enough to sustain him. Here was a man who could stand on stage, sing, jump, shout, and prove it all night in front of thousands of people, but couldn’t sit up straight across a table from his friends or a girl.
Allen White must have studied thousands of still shots of Springsteen offstage. I’ve seen quite a few myself, and never have I been so aware of his tendency to slump and make himself smaller in candid or staged photos. I recognized it tonight, though. It would have been plenty for Allen White to sound like Springsteen when speaking or singing. In fact, he does it so well that there were times when I couldn’t tell the difference between the icon’s voice and the actor who was playing him. More than that, it is Allen White’s posture that sold me on the performance. Even the way Allen White walks with his hands in his leather jacket looked like Springsteen.
What’s most remarkable is that Allen White isn’t just doing an impersonation. Whether it was his intent or not, he makes Springsteen smaller, which in turn makes him relatable. Springsteen would probably win a lot of polls asking the question, “What rock star do you think you’d be most comfortable around,” but much of that has to do with an amiable and entertaining personality that hid a deep well of depression from the public for years.
Deliver Me From Nowhere smartly focuses on a moment in time during Springsteen’s life. With a career on the ascent, the record company wants a new album with more hits that they can hawk to the masses. Nebraska is not that record. Recorded almost entirely alone on a low-quality cassette player, Nebraska is closer to the “sides” Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson completed before high-quality studios existed. More than a little of the film’s humor comes from Bruce’s own team and the record company being incredulous that Springsteen wanted to put out an album of what amounted to poorly recorded demos instead of Born in the USA, which he was making simultaneously. Springsteen’s band, studio crew, and his own manager, Jon Landau (played by Jeremy Strong), don’t understand what he’s trying to accomplish.
What becomes clear as the film moves forward is that Nebraska is an exercise in self-exorcism. That which haunts Springsteen must come out. The interesting choice that’s made is to show that the purging of demons via artistic expression only takes the film’s subject so far. There is a scene late in the movie where, for the first time, confronting his depression with a professional, Springsteen finally breaks. In a wordless display of emotion that evokes the inability to know where to start, Allen White is devastating. I would have liked it best had the movie ended right there, but there are a few more scenes after that, which play to the desire to have the audience leave the theater in comfort. They’re well done, but they aren’t additive.
An excellent cast supports Allen White. Strong adds his usual intensity and eccentricity. Paul Walter Hauser brings comedic relief as a Springsteen staffer of a sort. Stephen Graham (who is having one hell of a year) makes the most of his every scene as Springsteen’s destructive father. Best of all is Odessa Young as a woman Springsteen might be able to have a life with, if he could only get out of his own way.
But ultimately, Cooper’s film is the Jeremy Allen White show. Just as the man he is playing isolated himself to make the darkest record of his life, Allen White is often seen alone, and even when he’s with other people, he still seems alone. Allen White has been on a tremendous career roll thanks to The Bear, and he’s every bit as present and soulful as he needs to be to pull off the tall order of playing a living legend.
Bruce Springsteen is a man who has built a reputation as an artist who sings songs for the people. This time, he had to sing to himself. Never is this more evident than while writing the lyrics to the album’s title track. As Springsteen goes back over the song, he changes the words “he” and “him” to “I” and “me.”In a sense, he had to die to come back. Deliver Me From Nowhere is a comeback story for a man few of us knew needed one.
I’ve been a “music guy” my whole life. My stepfather was in an early version of Tommy James and the Shondells. He was a mean, bitter drunk, but when he was working the night shift, I could sneak into his vinyl stash and play a few records. As I grew older, the spark of those early years playing music in the kitchen on that half-decent record player became the fuel I needed to survive both at home and out. I put myself through college by running a record store. I also went to the movies a lot.
I no longer have that Nebraska album on my wall. I took it down. Records are meant to be played. And if Nebraska is overly rough and raw, and recorded at low volume to reduce the distortion of the source tapes, well, as one character in the film says, “people can turn the knobs themselves.”
And if you turn up the music you need loud enough, you can drown out the desperation and keep yourself alive until you find the help you need. Until you can come back. So, if you have to, turn it up loud. It’s what I do, and I’m still here.
Deliver Me From Nowhere is the opening night selection at the Virginia Film Festival. The film opens in wide release on Friday, October 24.
