Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025) is contemplative, deep, dark meditation on loneliness and one man’s desperate search for redemption. Directed by Scott Cooper, the film hums with the same weary melancholy that courses through Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska, the work it seeks to understand rather than dramatize.
At the center of it all is Jeremy Allen White, playing Springsteen, not as a rock god but as a man teetering between creation and collapse. His performance is astonishingly inward, full of pauses and glances that say more than any monologue could. White doesn’t imitate Springsteen; he inhabits him, showing the quiet torment of a man haunted by ghosts of working-class dreams and moral disillusionment. His face, often half-lit and heavy with exhaustion, becomes a canvas for the film’s many shades of gray.
The soundtrack, which includes songs from at least seven Springsteen albums, gives the film its heartbeat. But each each song from Nebraska is simultaneously grounding and ghostly, reminding us of Bruce’s reckoning with a haunted past. Cooper wisely lets the music breathe, often fading dialogue beneath a guitar line or the hum of an old tape recorder, inviting us into the same creative solitude that birthed those songs.
Visually, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema wraps everything in muted blues and amber browns, as if the whole film were filmed at the edge of twilight. He captures the deeply reflective essence White developed as Carmen Berzatto in The Bear and goes back time and time again to Springsteen’s abusive past and the difficult relationship he had with his father.
If there’s a flaw, it’s that the movie occasionally gets lost in its own somber haze. But then again, so did Springsteen (and that’s sort of the point). Deliver Me from Nowhere isn’t here to celebrate the Boss; it’s here to sit beside him in a sparse dark bedroom and listen.
