Jeremy Allen White Faces The Bear in Springsteen Biopic

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere comes with an intense hook and a niggling problem. The hook is Bruce Springsteen’s most haunted album, Nebraska, presented as a pressure-cooker character study. The trouble is, every time Jeremy Allen White furrows his brow, you can practically hear a ticket machine belching out orders in a Chicago kitchen. White is a compelling and sure-footed screen presence, but the film re-creates the rhythms and claustrophobia of The Bear so eerily the line between Carmy Berzatto and the Boss becomes fuzzy.

A Performance Haunted by Another Defining Role

The physicality, interiority, and precision of White’s performance stand out. He doesn’t reach for a massive impersonation so much as the gravitational pull of a man circling his own storm. The stillness, the breath control, the unsettling torque of his jaw — it all comes across as Springsteen’s stoic melancholy rather than Carmy’s simmering panic. But Scott Cooper’s filmmaking decisions — the tight framing, the unrelenting close-ups, sound design that emphasizes silence until it hums — put Springsteen in a place not unlike The Bear’s walk-in freezer. The similarity is not White’s fault; the direction steers the performance toward an already well-traveled anxious register.

To its credit, the film knows that a repressed songwriter and an eruptive chef are not the same thing. If Carmy is a pressure cooker, White’s Springsteen is a reservoir: deep, cold, and deceptively quiet. A late sequence of silent disintegration — White allowing grief to simply spill out in gasping sobs — ranks with the actor’s most devastating work.

The Music and Enduring Myth of Springsteen’s Nebraska

The movie’s attention is directed to the making of Nebraska, the chilling studio-less 1982 album — a famously abstemious move after The River broke big in a major way — recorded on four-track cassette tape at home. The album Nebraska, which hit No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and was certified Platinum by the RIAA, has been a frequent addition to canonic lists from outlets such as Rolling Stone magazine for pushing along Americana and alt-country. Cooper homes in on that artistic left turn, demonstrating how isolation and discipline can be as brutal as they are clarifying.

There are sharp choices here: the drone of tape hiss, the tactile ritual of rewinding cassettes, and how sound engineer and manager Jon Landau (played with somber restraint by Jeremy Strong) listens, eyes closed, as though listening for the marrow of a take. But it’s also all made to seem like a tidy connect-the-dots game: Watch Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” read about Charles Starkweather, and then write “Nebraska”; remember a childhood memory of a mansion and then write “Mansion on the Hill.” The leap from referentiality to revelation is treated as a straight line when, in fact, Springsteen’s best work metabolizes influence into something murkier and more personal.

Familiar Traumas and a Backstory That Feels Too Thin

Cooper, who steered an insider’s portrait of a broken troubadour in Crazy Heart, opts for a more literal take here. Black-and-white flashbacks chart Springsteen’s boyhood, with an abusive father (a flinty Stephen Graham) and watchful mother (Gaby Hoffmann). These passages depend on signifiers we’ve seen many times — a burning cigarette, a can of beer, another slammed door between two people — and they flatten what Springsteen has often explained in interviews is a complex inheritance of shame, anger, and tenderness. The shorthand mitigates the film’s thesis about how those bruises resonate through the Nebraska tapes.

The romance with Faye (Odessa Young) is relatively schematic as well. Small exchanges are sweet and stagy in the beginning, and then the story shoves Springsteen into isolation, and a confrontation between him and his dad plays like a template for prestige-TV alienation. The beats may be true to the archetypes of a tortured genius, but they turn few corners that feel true to the specifics of these two particular individuals.

Where the Film Truly Soars and Finds Its Own Voice

When the film stops elucidating pain and merely stages the work, it sings. The rehearsal-room scenes and bar gigging — sweaty sets at a stand-in for the Stone Pony included — have charge and texture. White, who does his own singing, is not Springsteen, vocally speaking, but the phrasing and force are convincing enough to fill the room. You can see why an audience leans in, and you understand why a bandleader won’t quit, even if it’s too bright under the lights.

Cooper’s crew nails the analog grain of the early 1980s: muted browns, low-watt bulbs, tape reels, and battered guitar cases. The sound mix relishes the flaws of cassette recording, a creative decision that steadies the film more than its flashbacks. It’s the tactile detail among these, along with Strong’s clear-eyed Landau and a tasteful needlework of E Street textures, that give the movie its pulse.

The Bear in the Room: Style That Overshadows Insight

Biopics are increasingly skipping the cradle-to-encore sweep, à la A Complete Unknown. “Deliver Me From Nowhere” continues that trajectory, but by narrowing its scope to a single creative crucible and indulging in anxiety-forward filmmaking, it draws to mind The Bear in ways it can’t quite shake. The visual grammar — tight frames, breathy silences, sudden crescendos — sells tension, not illumination. It describes the throb, but it’s far rarer that anyone arrives at the why.

Verdict: A Strong Mood Piece That Stops Short of Depth

Jeremy Allen White delivers a thoughtful, interior performance that seems more self-contained than mere impersonation, and the musical scenes crackle with life. But the film’s use of shorthand for familiar traumas and its linear representation of inspiration keep it short of the profound kind that Nebraska has provided to generations of critics, musicians, and fans. As a mood piece, it works. As a disclosure about the Boss, it revolves around the pain in place of cutting into it.

World-premiering at the New York Film Festival and released by 20th Century Studios, Deliver Me From Nowhere should be catnip for audiences pining after lived-in performances and analog grime. Persons interested in a biopic that would truly break away from The Bear — or the safer myths of genius — may find themselves wishing for more.