The Bear Does The Boss: Jeremy Allen White Channels Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere

The Bear does The Boss - Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen

SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE

Written and directed by Scott Cooper.

Starring Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Odessa Young and Stephen Graham

HOW DO YOU PROVE a negative? What can you show when you say something didn’t happen or couldn’t have happened? Or wasn’t there?

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is a film about absence, about what isn’t or wasn’t there but we assume should be. Principally an absence inside Bruce Springsteen, but in a wider sense a whole series of relationships, from his to ours. There are things not said, things not felt, things not explained, by a central character who can’t, a father who won’t, and an audience that might but can only guess.

This is what makes Scott Cooper’s film, focused on a few months in a career of nearly 60 years – during which the album Nebraska and its better-known sibling Born In The USA were conceived – fascinating and what prevents it from being more than pretty good.

The Springsteen we meet at the beginning of the film is known – well, let’s say recognised, and leave known for a bit – by more people than ever before. He has just completed the biggest tour of his career, riding his first top 10 hit, and as the record company execs would tell him if they could get near him, he’s “on a rocket” in whose slipstream they want to be in. This is Reagan’s America and everything is going to be bigger and better and brighter.

"We're going to need a single," - Jeremy Strong as empathic manager Jon Landau

Yet here is Springsteen in a furnished but soulless rented house, near where he grew up but tucked away in isolation; occasionally jamming with a local band on bar band classics but writing windblown songs of stark folk; falling in with a local woman, her child and moments of joy, yet never bringing them to his house where he watches TV alone; writing songs an industry is set up, and begging, to release but recording them in a format – cheap, bare, sonically redolent of pre-fame Elvis and starkly solo – that no one would think to release.

His dreams are of a childhood ragged with fear and incomprehension of his perpetually dark-browed father but punctuated by the love of a mother who glows but remains undefined. His lyrics begin as stories drawn from the psychologically blank offcuts of what came after the Greatest Generation, but as their characters edge from “he” to “I” the line between protagonist and creator blur to insignificance. All of them, the murderous, the family obligated, the hopeful, the father, the son, have an emptiness at their core where connection would be.

There may be regrets - Odessa Young as Jersey native Faye

He knows this, we know this, but he can’t say why because he doesn’t have the language, he doesn’t have the practise, and while he has a door in to this environment, he doesn’t have a way out. To borrow from a description of the art of Edward Hopper, in a world full of interactions, Springsteen is always alone. And it is crushing him.

Deliver Me From Nowhere feels most real and true as the portrait of a slide into depression where no manner of praise or wealth or countervailing argument is able to stop it, only the final, slowly slowly then all at once crumbling of defences giving hope.

A quite superb Jeremy Allen White’s best quality as a slowly deteriorating Springsteen isn’t the more than credible reproduction of the singing voice, but the waves of want and terror that wash across his face at each engagement with anyone, from Odessa Young’s local waitress-turned-lover who asks little and inevitably gets even less, to his father, played by Stephen Graham with an intensity that holds together the twin poles of “manly” strength gone sour and his own undiagnosed depression that almost destroys everything, not least his son.

Pater very familias Stephen Graham

Yet here is Cooper’s biggest hurdle. Not just how much you will care for a man falling apart from a hollow centre, but what do you understand of him that might cause you to care?

Choosing to avoid the usual biopic clichés of dream/struggle/success/stumble/redemption, the film about a man who can’t explain what is happening to him, leaves a lot unsaid. We are given no context for this point in Springsteen’s career, no sense of why what he is writing is out of step and how this album is both anomaly and natural and necessary step, no significance for the band we see in the studio (but never hear speaking), and only a little of why where he is going might conflict with where he came from.

Ironically, the things unsaid elsewhere mean that Jeremy Strong (showing layers of complexity and a way with turtleneck sweaters as manager-but-firstly-friend Jon Landau) is lumbered with far too much compensatory exposition, often to a wasted Grace Gummer as his wife Barbara who has nothing to do but look concerned and moisturise her hands, but also to a stand-in record company executive, engineers, himself and Bruce. Which is another waste.

The goal to reach beyond the fans may have in fact made this film even more of a fan vehicle: there are striking performances, there are (fragments of) songs that really matter, there is an interesting experience that is at times powerful, but the bridge from narrow to broad appeal is incomplete.