ROCK AND ROTE

The Boss's life is reduced to cliche in 'Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere', while Josh O'Connor shines in offbeat art-heist tale 'The Mastermind'

- Clarisse Loughrey

Collar? Popped.

Hands? Deep in the pockets of a leather jacket. Posture? Hunched somewhere between man and folding chair. Jeremy Allen White makes for a perfectly convincing Bruce Springsteen in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. Slide some brown contacts in there, and his soulful, kicked-dog expression can do the rest; hand him a guitar and he'll croak out the side of his mouth like his voice, too, is rising straight up from the New Jersey soil.

Scott Cooper's film is about the genesis of Springsteen's 1982 album Nebraska, made at what everyone thought would be the height of the artist's fame, off the back of 1980's chart-topper The River. Instead, he rebuked all that with an intimate, folk-rooted ode to the blue-collar worker that consolidated his artistic integrity, all while Columbia's executives snapped feverishly at the gates.

Cooper spends much of Deliver Me from Nowhere's runtime convincing us of White's transformation, as he stares gloomily out of car windows, or across homestead balconies and half-abandoned boardwalks. Unfortunately, the rest, all that stuff that lives inside the mind, is reduced in his script to the same pop psychology we've come to expect from a music biopic.

Nebraska - and the depth of its engagement with history, class, and Catholic doom - has become, via black-and-white flashbacks, the product of pure childhood trauma. Enter, stage left, Stephen Graham as Springsteen's father, Doug. Graham is the actor you phone up if you want a character to be muddled in the cycle of self-hatred and violence. He does the grunt work, while the film cuts out all the hard, messy parts of confronting abuse. Instead, it offers us three easy steps: acknowledge, cry it out in therapy, and then forgive.