Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere review – brooding, earnest portrait of the Boss’ crisis years

Jeremy Allen White gives a committed performance in this awkward biopic, stranded between rock mythology and pop-psych melodramaThis Boss-olatrous film only partly escapes music-movie cliches. This happens when Bruce Springsteen finally leaves his New Jersey heartland, and sees a shrink in shallow LA where he has bought a house. Otherwise, it’s all chunks of expositional dialogue (“I’m just trying to find something real in the noise!” “It’s like he’s channelling something deeply personal!”), black-and-white flashbacks to his tough upbringing, scenes in the recording studio with producers and execs looking on wonderstruck behind the glass while the magic happens. And there’s some very strange stuff about Bruce’s romantic life.Jeremy Allen White does an intelligent, committed job as Springsteen; Jeremy Strong gives of his considerable best with the thanklessly dull role of Bruce’s manager and friend Jon Landau, and Stephen Graham is Springsteen’s abusive but troubled dad Douglas with whom Springsteen finally comes to terms. In fact White and Graham have the film’s best scene, a scene so weird that it must surely be true. Springsteen’s old dad, waiting humbly and penitently in the Boss’s dressing room after the show, asks Bruce in a voice filled with pathos to sit on his knee and Springsteen has to point out gently that he is a grown man and has in fact never done this before in his life, not even as a kid. Continue reading...

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