Great artists are often messy, toxic people. If there are any lessons from the history of musical biopics in particular, it’s that.
That’s not what they’re supposed to be about, of course. Filmmakers ostensibly make these movies to try to parse the nature of genius. But that’s, arguably, what they do worst. Scenes of artistic epiphany – a musician stumbling upon their biggest hit from an offhand conversation, for instance – usually come off clunky and forced.
But the genre stays compelling nonetheless for the sheer high drama of it all. The lives of musicians are littered with screaming matches and betrayal, extraordinary achievements punctuated by excess and tragedy. Watch a film such as 2024’s A Complete Unknown, for instance – with Timothee Chalamet playing Bob Dylan – and most of its runtime is spent watching the man mistreat everyone in his life not named Woody Guthrie.
Which makes Bruce Springsteen, often placed on Dylan’s pedestal of genius, an odd fit for a biopic. By all accounts, Springsteen is a fundamentally decent person who treats people with respect. In a career spanning more than five decades, he’s avoided scandal or gossip almost entirely.
And without scandal, how good can a musical biopic be? That’s the question lingering over Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, which opens in cinemas on Thursday across the Middle East.
The film stars Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen, who ironically has emerged as leading-man material precisely because of how convincingly he plays a messy, toxic genius on The Bear. While he may not be the spitting image of Springsteen, he’s a convincing foil – particularly when performing his songs. We may not see White hitting his highest emotional notes here, but we do see his other greatest skill on display – communicating a character’s rich, tortured interior life through palpable physicality.
This is not the kind of biopic that canvasses an entire lifetime. Instead, it zooms in on the making of Springsteen’s enigmatic 1982 album Nebraska. For fans, it’s his most legendary work – especially because, at the time, the artist refused to do a single interview to explain it.
The album was made up of raw demos recorded on a four-track cassette recorder in his bedroom – lo-fi, flawed, and haunting recordings unlike anything he’d ever released. It was full of dark tales of despair, disillusionment and desperation. With time, stories spread that he’d tried recording the album with his full band as usual, but hated what they’d made, so insisted his label release his home version never intended for the public. Critics and fans embraced it, setting the stage for his biggest commercial hit, Born in the USA, two years later.
Decades later, thanks to his memoir Born to Run and Warren Zanes’s book Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, what led to such a radical departure is a bit clearer. Springsteen was suffering from deep depression at the time, and as he explored the darkness of the characters he created for those songs, he unlocked a darkness in himself. Traumas he’d buried from childhood started to take over his psyche – and that pain may have consumed him had his longtime manager not compelled him to get professional help.
Inner pain isn’t very cinematic, is the problem. This is a small, intimate film led by a man of few words who couldn’t articulate what he was feeling even if he tried. And while that pain does cause him to push people away, he does so respectfully. He even treats the man who hurt him as a child – his father – with care and love. There is no shattering moment of loud catharsis.
What that means for us, the viewer, is a film that has to reach hard to find moments of external conflict – and has characters chunkily explaining to each other what Springsteen may be going through. To put it simply, that could make the film a bit dull for those who won’t attune themselves to its stillness. It doesn’t make it a bad film by any means, but it is likely to limit its appeal.
As a Springsteen fan, it was a joy to see these songs performed, and to get a glimpse into a world I’d dreamed of while listening to this album again and again. And in the days since I saw the film, I’ve found myself thinking back to the truth of this affecting central performance. But it’s not because of the music – it’s because of the emotionality.
You don’t have to be a Springsteen fan to connect with a character unable to grapple with what’s going on inside of them. You don’t have to be familiar with the small towns of New Jersey to know what it’s like to push people away pre-emptively because you’re afraid of hurting them. You don’t need to be interested in 1980s Americana to know what it’s like to still love the people who hurt you most.
In the end, the most important part of this story is that it didn't end here. Springsteen’s fate didn’t end in darkness. He found healing, and went on to create some of the most joyful, life-affirming music of his career. Great pain can make great art, yes, but it doesn’t have to destroy the artist to do so.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere in UAE cinemas on October 23
