‘Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere’ Sheds Light on a Pivotal Period: Film Review
by Jeff Burger
Like the recent A Complete Unknown, which limns only the first chapter of Bob Dylan’s career, a new film about Bruce Springsteen doesn’t try to tell its subject’s entire life story. Instead, it zeroes in on one pivotal period, which it uses to shed light on the artist’s character and artistic development.
Called Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, the movie, released on Oct. 24, 2025, draws its title from a line that appears in two songs on 1982’s Nebraska, “Open All Night” and “State Trooper.” Playing the lead role is Jeremy Allen White, whose credits include the TV series Shameless and The Bear.
This atypical biopic focuses on the early 1980s, when Springsteen had achieved fame with three consecutively released classic rock albums: Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and The River. Now, Columbia Records was looking for him to build on those successes by serving up another blockbuster. Springsteen composed the music that would ultimately provide exactly that on 1984’s Born in the U.S.A. At the time, though, he wasn’t primarily concerned with making that record, and he didn’t care a bit about scoring more hits or climbing a ladder to superstardom.
Instead, he was grappling with demons from his childhood and his troubled relationship with his mentally ill, alcoholic father, Doug (played by English actor Stephen Graham). As Deliver Me from Nowhere demonstrates with the help of frequently disturbing black-and-white flashbacks, that relationship led to emotional problems that linger to this day.
It also prompted Springsteen to put his Born in the U.S.A. tracks aside and concentrate on producing a powerful but much darker set of songs. As the film shows, at least a few of them—such as “Mansion on the Hill” and “My Father’s House”—relate directly to his childhood memories. All of them reflect his mood at the time.
Springsteen initially recorded these numbers in a bedroom on a four-track cassette tape machine, with his vocals accompanied only by his own guitar and harmonica work. Those recordings were to be demos that would serve as building blocks for rock performances by his E Street Band. But Springsteen quickly concluded that such performances would be a bad fit for this music. Instead, he wanted to release the demos just as they were. Moreover, he didn’t want to promote them with interviews or a tour, and he didn’t want any singles to be released from the LP.
Columbia’s executives were predictably unhappy, but as we see in the film, Springsteen stuck to his guns. His manager, co-producer and confidante, Jon Landau—well played by Succession’s Jeremy Strong—backed him up. The album, Nebraska, came out just as Springsteen wanted it to. It rose to #3 on the charts and remains not only a standout in Springsteen’s catalog but a testament to his artistic integrity. So is this film.
Jeremy Allen White stars in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
Scott Cooper, whose past movies include Crazy Heart and The Pale Blue Eye, was its writer and director. He based his script on Warren Zanes’ 2023 book, Deliver Me from Nowhere, and also appears to have drawn raw material from Born to Run, Springsteen’s excellent 2016 memoir. Springsteen’s love interest in the movie, Faye Romano (Australian actress Odessa Young) is a composite fictional character who represents his multiple failed affairs of the time, and some scenes in the film vary slightly from what really happened. For the most part, though, what you see on the screen mirrors the reality of Springsteen’s remarkable story.
It’s far from the exhilarating, upbeat tale that some fans might expect. Though we see a few snippets of Springsteen in concert, rocking out in front of adoring fans, the lion’s share of this movie captures a very different offstage persona. This is a man adrift, trying to remain true to his art while simultaneously seeking to find the peace that keeps eluding him.
Related: A further look at the book on which the film is based
The cast is excellent, especially White, who does his own singing and captures enough of his character’s essence and vocal style to make you forget that he doesn’t look much like Springsteen. If you’re a fan of Springsteen—and especially if you’re interested in the creative impulses and personal challenges that gave birth to Nebraska—you won’t want to miss this film.
The newly expanded Nebraska collection on 4-CDs plus Blu-ray or 4-LPs plus Blu-ray, is available in the U.S. here, in Canada here and in the U.K. here.
Burger wrote one of the first interview-based profiles of Bruce Springsteen to be published in a national magazine. He has interviewed many other music-world luminaries as well, including Steve Van Zandt, Roger McGuinn, John Sebastian, Wolfman Jack, Tom Waits, Foreigner’s Mick Jones, Billy Joel, Steve Forbert, Tommy James, the Righteous Brothers, Gordon Lightfoot, Deep Purple’s Tommy Bolin, and members of Steely Dan and the Marshall Tucker Band. He has also interviewed many other public figures, such as Suze Orman, Daymond John, James Carville, Donald Trump, Sir Richard Branson, F. Lee Bailey, and Cliff Robertson.
His books include Dylan on Dylan: Interviews and Encounters, Lennon on Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon, Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters, and Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters, all of which are published in the U.S. and Canada by Chicago Review Press. The books have been republished in numerous other countries.
Burger has been the editor of several periodicals, including Business Jet Traveler, from which he retired in 2024. During his 20 years at that
publication, it received more than 120 major editorial awards, including multiple wins for the world’s Best Consumer Travel Magazine in the annual Folio:Eddie competition.
Burger lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey. His wife, Madeleine Beresford, is a puppeteer and former preschool director and teacher. The couple have two grown children.
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