From Freehold to Nebraska: A Springsteen Fan’s Take on Deliver Me From Nowhere

Some of you know I’ve been a Springsteen fan for as long as I can remember. One of the first concerts I ever took my wife to , back when we were still dating , was Bruce’s No Nukes concert, the moment he truly arrived on the national stage. That night cemented something for both of us: the music, the energy, the sense that Bruce was telling important stories, too. My obsession with him has only deepened over the years . I once wrote a college paper comparing The Price You Pay to Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, used the opening lines of Thunder Road for my Public Speaking final, and even had a personalized license plate that read B2R (if you know, you know). So when Beth and I saw the trailer for Deliver Me From Nowhere, we knew we’d be there at the first showing, reliving a piece of that magic while adding a whole new layer to our lifelong connection with the Boss.

Bruce Springsteen has never been shy about looking into the dark corners of the human soul, but Deliver Me From Nowhere doesn’t just visit the darkness on the edge of town. It moves in, unpacks a suitcase, and writes a masterpiece there. This isn’t your standard rock-star-gets-famous-then-falls-apart biopic. There are no stadium montages, no record execs yelling “we need a hit single!” in every scene (though one tries). Instead, Cooper gives us something much rarer , a portrait of an artist trying to stay human while his ghosts refuse to leave the room. This movie probably won’t have the crossover appeal of Walk the Line, Elvis, or A Complete Unknown, but make no mistake: if you’re a Springsteen fan and want an even closer look at what makes him tick, you’ve just entered The Promised Land.

Jeremy Allen White (The Bear) doesn’t just play Bruce; he inhabits him. His performance feels lived-in, not imitated. This is the Bruce of Nebraska, not Born to Run a man alone in a rented Jersey house, armed with a guitar, a tape recorder, and a thousand unexorcised demons. White’s Springsteen doesn’t strut; he broods, he wrestles, and when he finally sings, you feel like you’re hearing a confession instead of a performance.

The film opens in black and white as little Bruce (Matthew Anthony Pellicano) in the passenger seat while his mother drives him to retrieve his drunken father (Stephen Graham, all clenched fury and heartbreak) from a local bar. Those early scenes hit hard, and it’s all there in stark black and white, showing exactly where a lot of Bruce’s anger, fear, and music came from. And that’s what I loved about this movie it doesn’t shy away from his past. The use of black and white and those heavy shadows doesn’t just make the scenes look authentic; it deepens the sense of emotional foreboding, like the darkness Bruce would later wrestle with was already waiting for him.

In my review of A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic, I complained that we got about 30 seconds of his relationship with his parents with a reference to a scrapbook, blink and you missed it. Here, the opposite is true. Bruce’s childhood drives the story. His father’s rage and silence are the emotional soundtrack beneath every song he writes. Cooper doesn’t just show us what happened; somehow he manages to show us how it feels.

The main story picks up in 1981, right after The River tour. Bruce is exhausted, famous, and completely lost a dangerous trifecta. The record company wants another Hungry Heart. Bruce, instead, wants to retreat to Freehold, sit in the dark, and read Flannery O’Connor. (Full confession: I had no idea who Flannery O’Connor was, so I looked it up , she was a Southern Gothic novelist who specialized in morally complicated, often grotesque characters and stories that didn’t shy away from pain. In other words, the perfect soundtrack for a young man wrestling with his own demons.) Bruce apparently found inspiration in her unsentimental, sometimes brutal, but deeply human approach, which is pretty much the emotional blueprint for Nebraska. Nothing says “party” like Flannery O’Connor, indeed. He starts recording the songs that will become Nebraska stark, haunting, and as lonely as a turnpike at midnight.

But literature wasn’t the only spark. Movies have always played a huge role in Springsteen’s creative world. He’s name-checked Joan Fontaine in “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?”, reminisced about “trying to learn to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be” in “Backstreets,” and even borrowed the title Thunder Road from a 1958 Robert Mitchum film he’d never actually seen just a movie poster that somehow said everything he wanted to say. So it’s no surprise that Badlands , Terrence Malick’s haunting 1973 film about doomed young lovers on a killing spree , became another major influence.

Malick’s Badlands was based loosely on the Starkweather-Fugate murders, but what really stayed with Bruce wasn’t the violence it was the emptiness, the eerie calm of two lost souls drifting through the American heartland. You can feel that same desolate beauty echoing through Nebraska, from its characters on the edge of redemption to the hollow highways that seem to go on forever. Cooper taps right into that connection, blending O’Connor’s moral darkness with Malick’s visual stillness to show how Nebraska was born — out of exhaustion, obsession, and the flicker of humanity that refuses to die, even in the dark.

And just when the music fades and you think Bruce might have found his way out, those final lines from the song “Nebraska” land like a confession whispered into the void:

“They declared me unfit to live

Said into that great void my soul’d be hurled

They want to know why I did what I did

Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.”

It’s hard not to hear that as more than just a character speaking it’s the sound of Springsteen staring straight into his own darkness, trying to name it before it swallowed him whole.

Jeremy Strong is terrific as Jon Landau, Bruce’s manager, mentor, and occasional therapist. Their dynamic is the film’s beating heart two men trying to make sense of genius without letting it destroy them. Strong plays Landau with warmth and quiet understanding, the rare music exec who actually listens instead of lectures. Their scenes together crackle with unspoken emotion; you get the sense these two men truly needed each other to survive that moment in Bruce’s life.

Then there’s Faye Romano (Odessa Young), a fictional waitress and single mom who becomes Bruce’s brief romantic escape and reminder of how emotionally unavailable he’s become. She’s not based on a real person but rather a composite of several relationships from that era. Faye’s there to reveal, not distract to show that even “The Boss” was losing control of the steering wheel.

The music scenes are sublime. When Bruce sits alone strumming “Atlantic City,” you feel the emptiness of that Jersey house. When the E Street Band bursts into an early “Born in the U.S.A.” demo, you feel the thunder of rebirth. Cooper knows how to use the songs , not to sell a soundtrack, but to tell the story.

And for Springsteen diehards, there are wonderful Easter eggs sprinkled throughout. In one flashback, Bruce is framed in the kitchen doorway just like the photo from Nebraska’s inner sleeve. In another, Landau scoffs when a Columbia exec wonders if Bruce will ever release his outtakes a great inside joke, since Bruce has since put out roughly 101 of them.

By the film’s final act, we’re deep in Bruce’s depression not as melodrama, but as raw honesty. Cooper resists the Hollywood urge to wrap it up neatly. There’s no sudden epiphany, no cheesy montage of recovery. Just Bruce, facing his darkness head-on, and somehow turning it into music that helps the rest of us face ours.

Deliver Me From Nowhere doesn’t mythologize Springsteen it humanizes him. It’s a movie with more soul than swagger, more silence than spectacle, and more truth than triumph. It’s about the cost of creation and the courage it takes to keep looking in the mirror when you don’t like what you see.

This movie probably won’t be a box-office hit and that’s fitting. When Nebraska came out in the fall of 1982, it wasn’t built for mass appeal either. In a year ruled by synthesizers, MTV, and feathered hair think A Flock of Seagulls, Lionel Richie, Olivia Newton-John, and The Human League Bruce dropped a bare-bones cassette of ghost stories recorded in his bedroom. Fans were baffled, critics were divided, and the record company had to be wondering if their biggest star had lost his mind.

And yet, Nebraska quietly became a success story of its own kind. It climbed as high as No. 3 on the Billboard charts, went platinum within a few years, and topped charts across Europe. But more importantly, it carved out a strange, haunted corner of rock history one where silence mattered more than sound.

The critical reaction at the time was just as complicated as the record itself. Some hailed it as a daring act of honesty the musical equivalent of stripping the paint off your own soul. Rolling Stone praised its focus and fearlessness; The New York Times called it one of the few albums willing to ask hard questions without pretending to know the answers. Others, though, thought it was too stark, too bleak “more admirable than likable,” as one critic put it.

That same split will probably follow Deliver Me From Nowhere. Some will see it as too quiet, too internal, too slow for a world that prefers its heroes louder and shinier. But to those who’ve walked alongside Bruce all these years who understand that the silence between notes can sometimes be louder than a guitar solo this film will feel like home.

Because just like Nebraska itself, Deliver Me From Nowhere isn’t trying to please everyone. It’s trying to tell the truth.

For this lifelong Springsteen fan — and my wife, Beth — we’d been counting down to this since the trailer dropped, and it delivered everything we hoped it would. From the stark black-and-white shadows to the haunting portraits of a man wrestling with his own demons, Cooper’s film captures the heart of the artist like nothing else. And as the man himself once sang, “Hey ho, rock and roll — deliver me from nowhere.” In that simple line, you feel the restlessness, the longing, and the search for meaning that the movie so powerfully brings to life. For anyone who’s ever loved Bruce, or simply wanted to understand the soul behind the songs, this is as close to the Promised Land as it gets.