Deepest Cuts

Director Scott Cooper takes us behind the scenes of his new film about Bruce Springsteen and the making of his most revelatory album

- By Daniel Williams

IT IS PART OF SPRINGSTEEN LORE THAT after seeing him perform in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 9, 1974, music critic Jon Landau wrote: “I saw rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” Well, a half century on, having just watched preview footage, here’s my sequel to Landau’s declaration: I saw the future of the music biopic and its name is Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere.

Unlike recent examples of the genre, Cooper’s movie, out October 24, is not a sweeping account of its subject’s life. Instead, it homes in on a few months in 1981-82, when Springsteen was flying high in the wake of his hit 1980 album, The River, but slipping nonetheless into melancholy and confusion, tormented by memories of his troubled childhood. At the time, everyone had expected his next offering to be another album replete with enthusiastic rock ’n’ roll and introspective ballads. Instead, the artist, 33 at the time, made one of the sharpest left turns in music history, retreating to the bedroom of his rented farmhouse in Colts Neck, New Jersey, to record, unaccompanied, the ten bleak and mournful tracks of Nebraska. Springsteen calls Nebraska his most self-revelatory work.

Deliver Me from Nowhere is based on the 2023 book of the same name by Warren Zanes. Jeremy Allen White (The Bear) plays Springsteen, while Scott Cooper (whose directorial debut, 2009’s