The 1A Movie Club Sees ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’

0:25That's Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. It's the first track on his 1982 album by the same name. When Springsteen released the album, fans didn't know what to make of it. It sounded so different from the boss's earlier work. But as the years have passed, the music world has come to appreciate its introspective and personal nature. And the story of the album's creation is one most wouldn't expect from an American music icon, which makes a new biopic telling that story so unique. Springsteen, Deliver Me From Nowhere, stars Jeremy Allen White, and it doesn't try to encompass the rock star's whole life and legacy.

1:01Instead, it finds Bruce in 1981, just off touring his fifth album. He should be on top of the world. He rents a house all to himself in New Jersey and turns his focus inward to reckon with his past before writing an album that will go down in music history. How well does the movie work? How does it measure up compared to other musician biopics? What did Springsteen himself think about it? We get into it after the break. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast, back with more in a moment.

1:36Joining us now from Los Angeles is movie club vice president and 1A entertainment correspondent, John Horne. John, it's always great to have you. It's great to be here. I'm going to try not to use any Springsteen song titles, but I do consider this my radio hometown. Also joining us is the author of the book from which the film is adapted, author and musician Warren Saines. Warren, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. So, John, the first thing fans might figure out in the opening minutes of the film is that this isn't a story about Bruce Springsteen's entire career, or even really his musical origin story.

2:12Where does this narrative start? This might be a little glib, but it really starts with state of mind. It's early in Bruce Springsteen's career, and he and it are taking off very fast. Springsteen has released his album, The River, with its huge hit single, Hungry Heart. Born to Run is out, and Born in the USA is about to be released. But fame and adoration are not what Bruce Springsteen is feeling in this moment. He is in the beginning of a mental health crisis that will eventually spiral. And he and the people around him don't really understand what he's going through. But Springsteen knows on some level that one way to either understand the crisis or to get through it is to sit down and write what is considered the most personal and revealing album of his career, and that's Nebraska.

2:58So the film is ostensibly about the writing and recording of Nebraska, but it's really about depression. And it's really about how depression doesn't care how famous or good-looking or talented you are. It's an equal opportunity disease, and it hits Bruce Springsteen at a critical moment in his life. But it's interesting. They never name it. They don't name it in the film. There's just sort of a postscript during the credits that actually gives a name to what he was experiencing. That's because people didn't talk about it. They didn't know what the name was. I suffer from depression. I recognized it immediately.

3:34And I think that's part of the challenge that Springsteen's going through is that people, they're ashamed to talk about being with an analyst. They don't even call them therapists at this point. They're ashamed to feel like they're weak or that they feel there's something that's not complete about them. When everything should be, ostensibly, based on how we judge people's happiness, should be great. And I think that's part of what the movie's saying is that we don't even – and Bruce doesn't have the language to talk about it either. And the songs, if you listen to the lyrics of the songs, they're very much about what he's going through inside his own head.

4:06And he's working out some issues, some very deep issues about his childhood and about his father. Warren, as I said, this film is based on your book of the same name. What's the significance of the title Deliver Me From Nowhere? Deliver Me From Nowhere is a line that appears not in one, but two of the songs on Nebraska, which told me that it was a line that mattered to Bruce, but it's also a symptom of the fact that he wasn't finished. When he was recording these, he was sitting in a bedroom, and he wasn't thinking he was making a record. What he captured on this cassette tape that he ended up releasing was work in progress.

4:50So there were lines that repeated. There were tempos that wavered. The recording itself wasn't up to commercial standards. But none of that mattered because it wasn't meant to be a record. But each time he re-recorded it, he felt like he was losing something. And the way he described what he was losing was he said he's losing his characters, which I think is worth talking about more. Yeah. What did you take away from that? Is it him losing the characters that he played in public or something else? The characters in these songs he was writing, there were so many deviations when Nebraska came out first it was this is the first record you know album number six first time we hear him without a band uh it's a man alone again in his bedroom but the other big change was no matter how much grit there there was in springsteen's catalog of songs uh there was always a sliver of redemption there was always that hint that there was a way out and that's what a lot of people latched on to.

6:06In Nebraska's songs, there was no hope. It was despair. It was violence. It was people falling apart. None of the songs were explicitly about Springsteen's life, but the characters in the songs were people he could identify with because he too felt hopeless. So when he tried to re-record it and he felt like he was losing his characters, it was an experience of losing the people he knew best, the people in that time closest to him. And it wasn't worth the loss. Warren, how involved was Springsteen as you wrote your book? Well, I was lucky to be in this process from the beginning and particularly lucky to have Scott Cooper appear on the horizon as a director.

7:06The first really significant meeting was when I drove in my Subaru with Scott down to the Jersey Shore. And we sat with Bruce and his manager, John Landau, who is played by Jeremy Strong in the film. And we sat for three hours, like just looking out at the ocean and eating steak sandwiches. And the first 90 minutes of that meeting, it was just talk about movies. The second 90 minutes was talk about a Springsteen movie based around the Nebraska period. And from that time forward, Scott and Bruce started connecting. The next meeting came about when there was an early version of a script ready to show to Bruce.

8:00Scott and I drove to Colts Neck, where Bruce lives now. We sat in a room with John, Bruce, Scott, me. And Scott read the whole script doing every character. And the sun went down as he was reading. No one turned on a light. Scott used his iPhone to read the script. And at the end of that, Bruce said, this is great. And then he started giving Scott some little pieces of his life from that time. And what I got to witness in this, what was an incredible moment for me, was the way Bruce was going to help Scott, but at the same time, honor his creative space, not stampede into it. So there was a real generosity, but there was a very significant presence with Springsteen.

8:56John, this is a biopic about a legendary musical artist making a seminal album. How is Springsteen's music used in the film? Fleetingly. I mean, Scott likes to say he's made a musical movie without any music, which is, you know, clever, but not actually true. We do see Bruce writing and playing a lot of these songs. What Warren is referencing is the more they tried to record these songs as Bruce performed them, the less and less they sounded like it. So we see iterations of the songs as they get further and further away from what Bruce is feeling. We also see Bruce, you know, exposed to some pop cultural references that are starting to influence the way he's seeing the worlds.

9:39A Terrence Malick movie, there's a story about a serial killer that's starting to get into his mind. So it's as much about the songwriting than it is about the song playing, the song performances. That said, we do get to see him play. I mean, you don't want to go to a Bruce Springsteen movie and not see him in the band jam. And you do get to see the band jam. It's not just him sitting in a bedroom, strumming a guitar and playing in a harmonica. Coming up, we dive deeper into the story behind Nebraska and share more of your Springsteen stories. That's just ahead.

10:13Now, John, Bruce Springsteen's parents, particularly his father, who's played by Stephen Graham, play a big role in this film. How do their characters contribute to this story? I think, in many ways, they're ghosts. I mean, they're ghosts who haunt Bruce Springsteen's life, even though they're alive at the time of the telling of the story. Bruce had a difficult childhood and his father was not a good person to him. Scott Cooper talks about Bruce Springsteen being on set for most of the shoot, which must have been incredibly challenging for the actors, but he did say, Scott said that there was one scene when Bruce couldn't watch and that was when his father was being abusive in a kind of a drunken rage.

10:57I think, you know, there is a, without being, without spoiling the thing, Bruce comes out of it okay. So there is a reconciliation and he does get through it. But I think it's really a story about somebody trying to understand not only his own life, but his own life in relationship to the people he grew up with, about his mother, and about what his role, if any, was in his family situation. And I think that's, it's kind of it, you know, there are a lot of flashbacks in the film and Scott Cooper shoots them in a different way. So you know it's, you know, you don't know if it's memory or if it's actual, as those things happened, but they're clearly traumatic events and they clearly influence the way Bruce Springsteen is thinking at this moment in his life.

11:41Warren, what did Springsteen share with you about how his relationship with his father developed or changed as his career continued through the 80s? what was interesting in the book process and the movie does have an independent life from the book just like the book had an independent life from bruce's album but what we discussed for the book was more the relationship with the grandparents uh which is where Bruce and his mother and father were living until Bruce was about five or six. And what was significant was this was a home that was kind of frozen in grief. So Bruce's father's sister at age six, I think, was killed on her tricycle in the town of Freehold.

12:38and Bruce's grandparents in some respect kind of stopped time. And there was a portrait of this lost daughter, Virginia, that always hung just over the television in the living room of this home where Bruce was living as a young boy. And the grandparents' response, and they were really kind of in charge of Bruce, their response to having the first grandchild appear was to withhold all discipline. And Bruce, years later, in grappling with this, said, it was the making of me and it was the destruction of me. And while we were talking, that was the specific traumatic core that we were discussing.

13:38Now, the relationship with the father is kind of an extension of that trauma because he's the little boy who's living in that home stuck in grief before he's an adult with a child himself. So in putting the script together, Scott leans toward the father relationship. But it was part of this same fabric of unresolved grief that Bruce, there in his early 30s, it's one of those, you deal with your past or your past is going to deal with you. and he almost intuitively makes that choice which allows him to become the Bruce we know today which is to deal with that grief to try to understand it to see where it's paralyzing him in his adult life because as he said like his rock and roll meds have worn off it wasn't enough to be a rock All-Star to get that adulation, something was wrong.

14:48And in 1981 and 82, it came knocking. Well, as you said, Bruce Springsteen served as an informal advisor during filming. John, you hosted a panel at the Telluride Festival where Jeremy Allen White talked about what it was like having the singer on set. We were very lucky. We got to spend a lot of time with Bruce Sanjan prior to filming and they were incredibly accessible and honest and generous with their time. Yeah, no, we didn't know how much they were going to be around on set until we kind of got there. And yeah, I think in the beginning, so much of our job as actors is to kind of fall into a sort of delusion so that we're able to do our jobs well.

15:32And it's very difficult to kind of get lost, yes, when you're looking over at Video Village and you're seeing the man, you know. But over time, you know, I think Bruce and John as well, they were very respectful of the space. and I think understood that Jeremy and I had to kind of keep our heads down at a certain point and make our own decisions and choices. You know, I think Bruce did his best to make himself very small, but that's a difficult thing for Bruce Springsteen to do. But he was there if we needed him. John, how much do biopics benefit from situations like this where the subject is so present while the film is being made?

16:22Or can it be a detriment? It certainly depends. So it can be great for fact-checking and reference, but it's potentially dangerous, especially if A, that person doesn't really want a warts-and-all story, and B, the filmmaker is inclined to cater to those wishes, but it's not essential that the subject be unsaid. It can be an overly protective estate or about the artistic intention of the movie. I mean, you can have a movie like A Beautiful Mind, where even the mathematician John Nash wasn't around to tell director Ron Howard what to leave in and what to leave out. But, you know, they left out some good stuff that did not make John Nash look good.

17:03Trickier is like a movie like The Darkest Hour, where there's an invented scene with Winston Churchill talking to citizens on a tube car. Now, if Winston Churchill was on set, he'd go, that didn't happen. But the screenwriter, Anthony McCartan, said, yeah, but it shows this greater point. which is that you cared about what the citizens thought about your decisions. So it's dangerous, but it can be helpful, especially if the filmmaker is using creative license to get at a larger truth rather than just make stuff up to make the character look a certain way. Warren, why do you think Springsteen is ready now for this story about this moment in his life to be told on the big screen?

17:44Well, if you go back to his memoir, Born to Run, There's already a remarkable amount of self-exposure. And even prior to that, if you go through Springsteen interviews, he's always been exceptionally unguarded relative to the rock star possibilities. But I think in that memoir, he talks about this moment in 1982 when he finally asks for help at the urging of John Landau. He said that was the beginning of his odyssey. and I've talked with musicians, artists who dropped into therapy and felt like, okay, there, I think we got this tidied up. Let's move on. That hasn't been Bruce's story. He's remained really consistent with it.

18:47So when he said it was the beginning of his odyssey, he was talking about some long-term help, long-term support, deep analysis. And he saw changes. And he knows there are a lot of people out there who haven't gotten the kind of help that he's gotten who could benefit from it. So anytime he gets out there and tells his story, it might be one more person who says, it's time for me to ask for help. And I really think that drives him in talking with him. And this is a childhood hero we're talking about. I've got one part of me is a 12-year-old who can't believe I'm there, who I need to kind of quiet down a little bit.

19:42But there's another part of me who's a dad with two adult sons, a failed marriage behind me. And there's Bruce Springsteen, and he shares openly about his life because there are people like me who are learning from him. And he does it in such a way that he's not grandstanding. He's got a really, again, I get to survey the field. I've talked to a lot of people who experience a lot of success, And I'm just continually impressed by this guy's capacity to speak human to human in a way that requires a kind of exposure on his part. So I think making the movie is part of that larger project of, you know what, we could all use a little extra support.

20:39And if we don't get it, the repression involved just puts this dangerous energy inside of us. Well, that's Warren Zanes. He's a musician and the author of Deliver Me From Nowhere, the book on which the biopic by the same name is based. Warren, thank you so much for speaking with us. It's been great. Thank you. Now let's bring in a new voice to this edition of the 1A Movie Club. Sadie Sartini-Garner is a contributor for Pitchfork, and she wrote a review of the new film for the outlet. Sadie, welcome to the program. Hey, thanks for having me. So we've seen a raft of musical biopics in recent years, depicting the lives of Elvis, Bob Dylan, Amy Winehouse.

21:22Where does this one stack up for you? I would say that this one is a very good musician biopic, which makes it a pretty good movie overall. all. I think it's a little bit more interesting and a little bit closer to the bone than something like A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan movie. I think it really gets at, all these movies sort of purport to get at the humanity of the musician, and they try to make us realize, oh, Brian Wilson is somebody who's quite a bit like us, actually. He has his own issues. He has his mental health things that he goes through, and that affects his life and his relationships.

22:00But all of these movies kind of tend to end up making the figure at the center bigger and their their struggles tend to be what's presented as what powers their art and i think what's fascinating about this movie is that it sort of does the exact opposite where all of the creative energy is is it comes before he really hits rock bottom you know he's he's in the cabin he's making the record um and And it's not really until he finishes laying down the tracks and realizes that he's not going to be able to share this music because of either the record label or because of the difficulties in mastering off of a cassette tape.

22:45It's once he realizes that he's going to have trouble expressing this side of himself that the depression really starts to take hold of him. And I think that's a really interesting thing. And it's also, of course, you know, everybody has a relationship with their father that they have to navigate. And everybody has these sorts of childhood issues. And the traumas that the movie explores are therefore very, very accessible. I mean, they're things that basically everybody goes through. Whereas, you know, something like, like I personally will probably never upset Pete Seeger in the way that Bob Dylan did at Newport.

23:27So I can't identify with that so much as spectate it, you know? Well, John, it's interesting. This isn't the first time Cooper has made a movie about troubled men, Scott Cooper, the director. There's his 2009 film Crazy Heart starring Jeff Bridges as a down-on-his-luck country musician. There's 2015's Black Mass about notorious criminal turned informant Whitey Bulger. What do you think it is about these kinds of stories that fascinates Cooper, and how does it show up in his directorial style? I think he's somebody who has always been uninterested in feel-good romantic comedies. Although I would argue this film is ultimately very optimistic.

24:08As we know, Bruce is still around. He's still doing okay. His movies have always had an edge. I would argue that edge usually kind of gives him some sort of insight. We talked about Crazy Heart, Black Mass. I would also talk about a Western he made called Hostiles, starring Christian Bale. I mean, you can watch that movie today and say it's not only a really good Western, but it also has a lot to say about immigration and who gets to call a place home. and whether or not you can say someone's in a country illegally when that country itself has stolen land. So I think Scott has always looked at genre as a way of getting at larger truths.

24:49And what's fascinating to me about his Springsteen movie, it doesn't have the conventions of the rock biopic, where you see the artist, he or she is in a downer's bile, they're using drugs, their career is falling apart, their agent is enabling them. This has none of those things. And I think that's the other thing that Scott likes. the stories that you think you know how they're going to play, and they're not going to play a very different way. Let's take a quick pause here. We'll be back with more from our guests in just a moment. Stay with us.

25:21How Jeremy Ellen White plays Bruce Springsteen. He's an accomplished Emmy Award winning actor. John, here's another clip from your Telluride panel where White talked about how he prepared for the role. You know, I just, I know how much people love Bruce. I know that everybody who does really love Bruce they feel like they have their own very intimate understanding of him and I knew that taking on this role was going to probably break some hearts and disappoint people and so I think the biggest hurdle for me was kind of like getting out of my head in that sense and finding my truth and my path to this thing And I have to say, Bruce was very helpful.

26:05When we got together in Nashville and I recorded the majority of the album of Nebraska, Bruce called me about a week later and he had listened to, I think, Manchin was probably one of the first ones he'd listened to. And the one that we mixed, yeah, in Nebraska. And he listened and he called me and he said, you know, you sound so good. You sound a lot like me, but you're singing the song. and he said, that's what I want this process of making this movie to be like. I want you to sing the song. And he gave me permission in that moment to have my own understanding of this man outside of the Bruce Springsteen that we all know and love.

26:43And that was, I don't know if I would have been able to do it without that. Sadie, did Jeremy Allen White's performance work for you? Yeah, I think so. I think that he really takes on the vocal mannerisms of Springsteen's singing in a way that at times felt uncanny. Not to go back to Timothee Chalamet and A Complete Unknown, but at times in that film, he feels a little bit like he's doing everybody's Bob Dylan impression of singing through the nose and all that. And I think that Jeremy Allen White has this way of capturing the deep grit in Springsteen's voice, which I had actually never thought of in those terms before.

27:24I mean, I was born the year Born in the USA came out. I've literally been listening to that song my entire life. And I've never thought of that, the raspiness of the vocal in that song until seeing it in the movie. And I think he manages to capture that sense of sort of ragged determinism that's in a lot of that era of Springsteen's music in a way that certainly works for me also. John, what about for you? I think it works really well. I mean, I think one of the advantages of Nebraska for this film is people don't know it that well. So it's not like you know every inflection and every bit of pacing and phrasing.

28:07So in a way, that's a benefit. I think the real challenge for Jeremy is he is Bruce Springsteen. So there is kind of a base level of confidence, but there's also this vulnerability that he plays. The big invention of Scott Cooper's movie is Bruce Springsteen has a girlfriend at the time that he didn't have in real life. And the conversations that Springsteen has with his girlfriend are really at the heart of the movie. And that's where the performance is, to me, as effective as anything that Jeremy is singing. Because he is talking about something he doesn't have the language to talk about. And the singing is good.

28:43I mean, the challenge in the recording of Nebraska was that the more they worked on it, the less it sounded like Bruce. So it's a recording where even Bruce doesn't think it sounds like him. So that adds an extra layer level of difficulty. And for somebody who hasn't done singing and guitar playing before in a movie, Jeremy Allen White is fantastic at that. So I think it's a very good performance technically in terms of how he sounds and looks like Springsteen. But he also acts like a character who's having an interior crisis. And I think that's even harder to play. Well, and you mentioned the character Faye, who is Springsteen's love interest in the film.

29:18She's played by Odessa Young. She isn't a real person. She's an amalgamation of several women Springsteen was seeing at the time. Now, the other person who you hear the most dialogue between Springsteen and this character, it's John Landau played by Jeremy Strong. And John, I want to go back to your panel. And this time it's Strong talking about the impact Landau had on Springsteen's life and career. John Landau was sort of the preeminent rock critic in America and was the first critic for Rolling Stone that Jan hired. And he was a really important figure culturally. And then in 1974, famously wrote an essay that said, I've seen rock and roll's future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.

30:01And that sort of changed the trajectory of their lives. And then they linked up and have been together for 50 years. So that's Jan. um you know i guess you know i read an essay that john wrote in a in a in a his book too late to stop now he's someone who's very devoted to to music as an art form and devoted to artists he's he serves that in in an almost religious way um that's something i connect to now both john landau and Faye, in my viewing the film, I saw them as ways to sort of externalize the inner monologue Bruce Springsteen was having. John, how do you think the relationship between the two men and between Faye and Springsteen helps serve the narrative in this film?