Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
Note: This isn’t a review, but some quick thoughts and impression on the film.
Recently I’ve been put onto a lot of evening shifts. A lot of the films that I do want to watch at night overlap with my work so it’s a no go. The only times I can catch a movie are after 9pm. The movie can be good, but because it starts at 10pm, I’ll be awake in the first half but I tend to droop my head a little bit in the last third of the film.
Scrolling through the movies that are out right now, I saw this Springsteen film and, at first, I thought it was a concert film that they converted into 4K. Just like Timothy Chalamet playing Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown (2024), this was also a biopic played by Jeremy Allan White (the guy from the TV show The Bear).
It was way different than the Bob Dylan biopic. This film follows Springsteen writing the 1982 Nebraska album where he recorded this dark album in his home with nonprofessional recording equipment.
In the film you see childhood flashbacks in black and white of him and his relationship with his alcoholic father. It’s not one of those biopics of a rockstar struggling with drugs or the fame and the large crowds. Instead of trying to create more of the same music that is making a fortune at the record label, Springsteen has something inside him that he’s trying to cough out and put it onto paper. He digs into his past as shown in the black and white flashbacks and as he drives to canonical childhood locations. You see him trying to write the lyrics down on a notebook with a felt-tip pen
This film was inspiring in several ways and I think it was something that I needed to see right now cause I am kind of in a slump myself.
The film also encourages to create despite not having the best equipment. In the film, Bruce wanted to record in his house instead of doing it in the best recording studio. He called up his friend to bring some recording equipment and he warned Bruce that “Hey man, this is amateur/beginner equipment are you sure you want to record with this??”
And then when he wanted to put the echo effect into his song, that friend warned him again, once you add the echo effect you can’t undo it. And he wanted that effect to create that mysterious distance to his music.
When he took the finished tape to the record label to listen, they were so excited cause he was making a crazy load of money for them and when they listened to it in the office, they had their elbows on their knees, hands in prayer against their nose not understanding what he was doing.
They begged him to redo it, make the recording clear and crisp, remove the echo, use the best equipment. But he wasn’t having it
