Spingsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

Spoiler Warning: Bruce did okay for himself...

I don’t usually do posts on current movies, but I had some thoughts on this one, so I figured, what the hell?

As a Bruce Springsteen fan, I was looking forward to this for awhile. I mean, whether you are a fan or not, the man has sold over 140 million albums worldwide over a career that has spanned over fifty years. He is a Rock n’ Roll Hall of Famer, an Oscar winner, a Tony winner and a 20-Time Grammy winner. He’s kind of part of the culture. Hollywood has been churning out the Rock biopics over the last several years, with Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman and I’m Not There, so you could say it was just Bruce’s turn. Whatever the reason, someone thought this story needed to be told on the big screen.

I’m just going to say right here that I’m not sure why.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is based on a book by Warren Zanes of the same name, and it covers the period of Bruce’s life after the end of his tour for the double-album The River. After so much financial success from his last couple albums, including Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, he returns home (almost literally. He rents a house pretty close to his childhood home.) with nothing really on his plate creatively, but a record studio chomping at the bit for a new rock n’ roll chart-topper. Bruce lays around his empty house (his family moved to California years earlier) and starts strumming his acoustic. He soon picks up a 4-track recorder and lays down a bunch of songs, most of which end up becoming the album Nebraska, and the rest get pushed off and became Born in the U.S.A. There is a brief insinuation that he would make yet another double-album, but thankfully that did not come to pass.

While he is getting advice from his manager, Jon Landau, and driving around town reminiscing about his father’s alcoholism, he also meets a girl, Faye. He goes on a couple dates with her and is very nice to her daughter, but soon ghosts her. I should point out here that Bruce didn’t date Faye in real life, but she is actually a composite of several women that he knew around this time. She has no real purpose in the movie except to bark at him for running away from his problems when he tells her he’s also moving to California. Other than not returning her calls, he was pretty honest with her, and let’s face it, even at this point in his life, he’s Bruce Springsteen. Did she really think that it was going to work out? But I guess the filmmakers thought he needed a love interest, so…

The movie then decides to portray Bruce as a pretentious artist when he decides that he dosn’t want to record his 4-track songs with the band and he wants to release them as is. No press, no tour, no fun. There are a couple scenes where his producer (played by Marc Maron, playing a spot-on Marc Maron) has to remove background noise and echo to make the tape that Bruce recorded studio-ready. But that conflict resolves itself pretty quickly. The studio head, even though he’s a tad annoyed that he’s not getting another rock album, decides to go with it anyway and that plot thread is sewn up pretty easily. So most of these conflicts don’t end up being conflicts at all, but I guess that’s life as a famous rock star.

Bruce then drives out West with a friend of his who is never named, and has a mental breakdown, and is told to go to therapy. He does, and we are then shown a title card that says “Ten Months Later…” and Bruce is coming off stage after another epic live performance, and he has a nice chat with his Dad, who tells him he;s proud of him. The movie ends with Bruce walking around Asbury Park, and we are told via more title cards that the album Nebraska made it to #3 on the charts, despite no tour, no press and no fun, and that Bruce continues to battle depression to this day, but does so with “help and hope.”

I literally didn’t know this movie was about mental illness until that moment.

I understand mental illness was treated differently back in the early 80’s, and people, especially rock stars, didn’t go to therapy that often, so good for Bruce Springsteen for taking the plunge. Unfortunately, such a journey is not very cinematic. Also, while it’s cool that he did what he wanted at the height of his popularity and released an acoustic folk album, I don’t know if there was enough of a struggle with that and with his battle with depression to make a movie about it. I honestly, would have rather seen what happened in those ten months that they skipped over than the stuff we got.

I do credit the movie for not just covering Springsteen’s humble beginnings all the way through to his success, because we’ve seen that a hundred times. However, much like the Nebraska album itself, I just don’t think this is the Bruce story that anyone wanted (I guess good on director Scott Cooper for doing it The Bruce Way.) Obviosuly, the album is great, and do yourself the favor of listening to the new re-issue, but in the end, people have to watch a movie, and when we do that, we like to see cool things happen. Maybe if it was all about the issues with his father, or just about the tug-of-war with the record company, or his depression, or even just his girl troubles, that would have been better. But they tried to cram all those problems in and didn’t really give enough time to any of them.

Part of the issue, really, is that there just isn’t a lot of drama here. Springsteen’s estimated net worth is around $750 million, and he is still making new music to this day (such as it is.) . While money isn’t a cure-all, and his battles with depression are very real, and his Dad was an alcoholic who used booze to cope with mental illness, Bruce seems to have risen above it all pretty well. In fact, he’s done so well, and produced so much great stuff that, even as a fan, I have to admit that a lot of his more current music is a little meh. Sometimes, art needs strife. His early stuff when he was really struggling was his absolute best, and not too many people will argue with me on that. I mean, he’s 76 years-old, so I’m not knocking him. He’s had a good run. But I also feel like the Trainspotting Theory applies here:

Maybe a little harsh, but there is some truth to it. Like I said, he did well for himself, and I don’t need a movie to tell me about one period of his life to show me that. But if anything, it may illustrate even more how good he was back then, when he was going through such a rough patch. As Sick Boy says in the clip, “Beautifully fucking illustrated.”

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