Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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Bruce Springsteen – known to his followers as “The Boss” – is considered the working man’s pied piper. He is best known for his songs that chronicle his working-class roots in New Jersey.

So far, Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen has released 21 studio albums spanning six decades. Lauded by Rolling Stone as “the embodiment of rock & roll,” he has sold more than 140 million records around the globe.

Two of Springsteen’s signature albums are “Born to Run” (1975) and “Born in the U.S.A.” (1984). He is the recipient of 20 Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, and is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

As one music critic put it: “Springsteen is unusual, if not unique, in his ability to write gripping, cliché-free prose and deliver it with power, humor, and humility.”

Most of his albums feature the E Street Band, his backing band since 1972. The band took its name from the street where the mother of one of the band members lived (she allowed the band to rehearse in her garage).

There’s a new movie hitting screens this week – “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere.” I wish I could report that it is a concert film, but rather this is merely a biographical musical drama about the gravelly, working-class baritone.

The film focuses on the making of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 “Nebraska” album when he was “a young musician on the cusp of global superstardom, struggling to reconcile the pressures of success with the ghosts of his past.” At the time, the singer was battling depression.

The songs on the album were “haunted by the ghosts of the 1950s teenage serial killer Charles Starkweather and the Italian-American mobster Philip Testa, and by Springsteen’s strained relationship with his father, a remote, hard-drinking blue-collar worker.”

Recorded on a 4-track recorder in the singer’s New Jersey bedroom, the lo-fi “Nebraska” album is considered one of his most important works – “a stark, somber acoustic record portraying the lives of blue-collar workers who try to succeed in life but fail at every turn, while searching for a deliverance that never comes.”

Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau’s first reaction to the album was to suggest his client seek professional help from a psychiatrist.

Jeremy Allen White (TV’s “The Bear,” Kerry Von Erich in “The Iron Claw”) was a non-musician prior to taking on the lead role in “Springsteen.” To capture the Boss’s distinctive New Jersey sound, White worked with a team of vocal coaches. He studied hours of archive footage to get the voice right.

Then, White found himself in the challenging position of having to pretend to be Bruce Springsteen in front of Bruce Springsteen, performing hits like “Born to Run” and “Born in the U.S.A.” live.

The real Bruce Springsteen has praised White’s performance, calling his singing “wonderful.” He added, “He sings very well.”

According to an extra in the film, “Jeremy Allen White is doing his own singing, and there were times when Bruce didn’t know whether what he was listening to was him or Jeremy.”

Springsteen is known for “saying no to every overture about making a film of his life since 1986.” But two years ago, he summoned film director Scott Cooper and writer Warren Zanes to his New Jersey abode to express his interest in a screenplay Cooper had written based on the book “Deliver Me from Nowhere” written by Zanes.

Cooper found the meeting “nerve-wracking” because he had to read the script to Springsteen and Landau, “who are both cinephiles.”

As Cooper tells it: “Before he was Bruce’s manager, Jon Landau wasn’t just a rock critic, he was a film critic, he was married to Janet Maslin from the New York Times for years. These men know movies. So, I’m at Bruce’s house, and I’m reading the screenplay aloud, all the dialogue, and all of the action. Every so often, Bruce or Jon would say something, and I’d quickly jot it down, just to correct something I’d written, make it more authentic. And then, at the end of it, I remember Bruce hugging me and saying: ‘This is it – let’s go.’ At that point, I knew we were off and running.”

“Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” is very much a period piece, “an evocation of both a moment in Springsteen’s career and an era in pop music that have both long receded into history.”

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com