A showbiz rock ’n’ roll version of Hamilton
You’d have to be a moral idiot to think that Bruce Springsteen’s mawkish Nebraska album was anything other than phony Americana. Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, the new movie about the making of that album in 1982, exceeds its sanctimony with pop-star self-mythologizing. It uses negativity to sell celebrity.
This mix of pop-star guilt and narcissism recalls Springsteen’s humble-brag consolidation with Barack Obama in their podcast Renegades; both millionaires furbish their Everyman image by posing as rebels. The conceit here is that Springsteen never wanted stardom. Despite national success, the New Jersey boy was haunted by his working-class background (introduced in drab black-and-white footage); a schizophrenic, toxic-male father; and an unglamorous bridge-and-tunnel outsider heritage.
So why the emphasis on Nebraska, his sixth album, rather than the previous, rousing formative records such as the two great pillars of rock-opera romanticism, Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town? On Nebraska, Springsteen made a bid for serious acclaim, adopting a disingenuous Oakie vocal tone for glum songs about American depression — presumably to match his own personal turmoil.
As portrayed by perpetual sad sack Jeremy Allen White, curly-haired Bruce labors at a small-town bar, mostly appreciated by lumpenprole clientele and pathetic, clingy, single-mother Fay (Odessa Young). That’s the “Nowhere” from which Bruce longs to be delivered. Escapism drives his professional pursuit that turns uncommercial and derivative. A reckless road trip suggests that he wanted to imitate both Bob Dylan’s storied motorcycle accident and his John Wesley Harding neo-folk album.
Hollywood hack Scott Cooper buys into this myth, undeniably using the shame and dissatisfaction perpetuated by Democrat Party figures Springsteen and Obama. Cooper’s direction and script foolishly erect this myth based on fatuous press-release fiction that Nebraska was inspired by Bruce accidentally catching a TV broadcast of Terrence Malick’s Badlands (a high-art digression from historic tabloid tragedy). We’re meant to accept Bruce’s idiotic approach heroizing serial killer Charles Starkweather as his protagonist — as if Bruce found the secret to all-American failure and misery.
Aiming at our credulousness, Deliver Me repeats the familiar legend that Nebraska was created when Bruce broke away from his E Street Band to compose and perform alone, in his bedroom, to a simple 4-track recorder (lyrics scratched on a notebook next to well-worn pages of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”).
What’s left out is the music industry’s manufacturing of Springsteen’s image. His manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) gets the film’s big scene telling off a Columbia Records executive: “In this office, in my office, we believe in Bruce Springsteen!” This BS shamelessly begs for applause. It goes against the facts of Springsteen’s popularity. After the embarrassing mediocrity of “Hungry Heart” (his first top-ten hit), Nebraska was marketed with the record company’s full weight (it had already promoted Bruce with “new Dylan” hype). Cooper offers scant evidence of the album’s lugubrious material but, instead, inserts a brief recording session of Bruce and the band banging out “Born in the U.S.A.” It keeps viewers awake. “You tapped into something terribly powerful,” Landau fawns. “We burned it up,” Bruce concurs.
This scene exposes Cooper’s narrative trickery. The cacophonous, strident “Born in the U.S.A.” was a pop aberration, the fatuous result of Springsteen’s tutelage by liberal middlebrows Landau and critic Dave Marsh, who encouraged his move from fake Vietnam War–inspired alienation to skeptical patriotism. (Call it Bruce’s first Obama song.) Thus, this bizarrely unrousing hagiography is an ersatz version of the usual showbiz biopic. (Its recent presentation at the New York Film Festival complemented the Lorenz Hart biopic Blue Moon.) Cooper’s myth is so ineffective that the film suggests Springsteen’s psychotic father took his son to see Night of the Hunter rather than the more likely Thunder Road, proving Cooper’s inadequate imagination.
Cooper shows no interest in the integrity of artistic creation (such as Godard’s Rolling Stones film, the visually intense, analytic pop manifesto Sympathy for the Devil). When White’s perpetually forlorn Bruce moans that he’s “trying to find something real in all the noise,” it seems fake. So does Landau’s early disbelief: “It’s like he’s channeling something clearly personal, and it’s pretty dark.” (Landau hails Nebraska’s “imperfection, the emotional atmosphere” as an aesthetic landmark when the true breakthrough of 1982 was Roxy Music’s diaphanous, almost tactile Avalon.) They never discuss Nebraska’s nihilism. And the story’s retreat to Bruce’s morose father-son issues and unsatisfying love life are insufficient. Fay’s exit line — “I believed you could be the man you pretend to be” — comes off as sour grapes. What’s worse is the exchange between Bruce and a used-car dealer: “I do know who you are,” and Bruce responds, “That makes one of us.” It’s unacceptable after the trenchant candor of Robbie Williams’s Better Man. This is how liberal Hollywood rewards Springsteen for his political betrayal of the working class. Deliver Me from Nowhere heroizes a lesser man-of-the-people who sports the feudal nickname “Boss.” It’s an unreliable and politically dishonest film, a showbiz version of Hamilton. Instead of the overly sincere Jeremy Allen White, they only needed to cast the insufferable John Legend.