The Boss finally gets a biopic, just not the one we expected

Actor Jeremy Strong in Copenhagen, Denmark, Aug. 21, 2025. The Boss finally gets a biopic, just not the one we expected; Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong, the stars of “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” and the director Scott Cooper on capturing a haunted rock icon. (Charlotte de la Fuente/The New York Times)

By BEN SISARIO

For months last year, Jeremy Allen White had Bruce Springsteen constantly speaking into his ears.

White was listening, over and over, to Springsteen’s 18-hour audio narration of his memoir, “Born to Run,” as part of extensive preparation to play him in the forthcoming film “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” which dramatizes the rock icon’s struggles to make his 1982 album, “Nebraska.”

“That was on in the house all the time,” White, best known as the star of the FX series “The Bear,” recalled in a recent video interview. “When I’d go for a run, when I’m going for a walk, when I’m making dinner. It was helpful to have his voice with me all the time.”

“Deliver Me From Nowhere,” written and directed by Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart”) and set to be released Oct. 24, has its share of the high-decibel heroics endemic to rock biographies, like a sweat-drenched White belting out “Born to Run” to a roaring arena crowd or jamming before a smaller gang of the Jersey Shore faithful at the Stone Pony.

But by focusing on “Nebraska” — a gallery of desperate, despairing characters, rendered in starkly acoustic form — and the depressive breakdown that Springsteen experienced in the aftermath of its creation, the film instead tells a story about the fragility of mental health and the limits of art alone to sustain it. In one striking scene, adapted directly from Springsteen’s memoir, the man usually seen as the platonic ideal of the stadium-commanding rock titan enters a therapist’s office and, without uttering a word, erupts in tears.

Cooper’s goal, he said, “was never about telling the whole story of Bruce Springsteen.”

“I was striving to make something that was quieter and more interior, which is about this very specific time in Bruce’s life,” the director added, “about a man who’s facing some of the trauma that he’s been carrying since childhood.”

“Deliver Me From Nowhere” is the first time that Springsteen has allowed his story to be dramatized on film, and it’s no accident that “Nebraska” is its heart. Springsteen has said he views the album as perhaps his best, but it has long stood out as an oddity, and maybe a mystery, in his body of work.

Made at the same time that he began working on songs that two years later ended up on “Born in the U.S.A.,” Springsteen recorded “Nebraska” alone on a rudimentary four-track tape machine in a rented house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, not far from where he grew up in Freehold. Springsteen worked on it in the months after a successful tour for “The River,” his first No. 1 album, which brought with it industry pressures to keep the hits rolling.

Warren Zanes, a musician and academic who first heard “Nebraska” as a teenage guitarist in the 1980s band Del Fuegos, said that despite his love for the album, he had long had difficulty comprehending it as a career move.

“It was, to me, one of the greatest left turns in the history of popular music,” Zanes said.

After reading the minimal description of “Nebraska” in Springsteen’s memoir — which is immediately followed by a detailed, probing account of an emotional crisis on a cross-country drive — Zanes began working on a book about the album, interviewing Springsteen and his longtime manager, Jon Landau. That book, also titled “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” was published in 2023, and Cooper based his screenplay on it.

Cooper’s film portrays Springsteen in this period as solitary and troubled, but also obsessively fruitful, drawing inspiration from Terrence Malick’s 1973 crime-spree drama “Badlands,” from the abrasive New York punk duo Suicide, from his own past. Springsteen develops the “Nebraska” songs while conjuring painful boyhood memories of his brooding, heavy-drinking father, who is seen in one black-and-white flashback striking the young Bruce. Eager for escape but fearful of losing the solidity of his roots, Springsteen begins a relationship with a single mom named Faye — a classic working-class Jersey girl, sweet but tough — but he cannot commit to her. (A composite figure, Faye is the only major character in the film not fully based in fact.)

“Bruce was haunted, not in the gothic sense, but spiritually,” said Cooper, sporting a black Stone Pony cap, a nod to the stalwart club Springsteen frequented. “I think he was haunted by his very emotionally distant father, haunted by this kind of myth of America — people who are striving for the American dream and falling short.”

Cooper said that he and Springsteen were determined not to make a hagiography, but rather to capture the singer-songwriter’s struggles and failings in addition to his successes.

“I wasn’t interested in mythologizing him,” the director said. “I wasn’t chasing the Boss. I’m chasing the man in a bedroom in Colts Neck with a four-track recorder, trying to make sense of his life, the trauma that he’s carried since he was a child.”

Once closely guarded, Springsteen’s experiences with depression eventually began to creep into his public biography, and he addressed them head-on in his 2016 memoir. His relationship with his father was also an undercurrent in “Springsteen on Broadway,” his 2017 solo storytelling performance.

“Long ago, the defenses I built to withstand the stress of my childhood, to save what I had of myself, outlived their usefulness,” Springsteen wrote in his memoir. “I relied on them to wrongly isolate myself, seal my alienation, cut me off from life, control others and contain my emotions to a damaging degree. Now the bill collector is knocking, and his payment’ll be in tears.”

White, Cooper said, was the only person he considered for the film’s lead. “I think they thought that I could tell a complex story with quiet moments, and with physicality,” White said.

But the actor hesitated at first. The part involved a significant amount of performance, but White was not a singer and had never played guitar. “I was like, ‘Look, I’d love to do this with you,’” he recalled telling Cooper. “‘I love Bruce. Are you sure you don’t want a guy that knows how to do these things already?’”

“And then at some point, Scott shared that Bruce wanted me to do it,” White added. “And at that point I went, OK, I’m not going to stand in this man’s way.”

Much of the film centers on Springsteen’s close, almost brotherly relationship with Landau, who as a music critic had championed Springsteen before becoming his manager and occasional producer. Their storied partnership, dating to 1975, is one of rock’s longest and most successful.

Jeremy Strong (“Succession,” “The Apprentice”) plays Landau as empathetic yet pragmatic. When he hears “Nebraska” for the first time, the manager strives to understand not only the music, but also what it says about his client’s wounded psyche. “He has a kind of magisterial sensitivity,” Strong said of Landau.

But Landau knows there is a limit to how much he can help Springsteen. At the end of the singer’s road trip, when he arrives to an empty new home in Los Angeles, he makes a desperate phone call to Landau, who tells him, “You need help — professional help.” Springsteen begins therapy, which he has credited with turning his life around.

Still, a degree of tension surrounds the release of “Nebraska,” especially with not-so-subtle pressure from the record company, CBS.

Of course Landau and Springsteen are ultimately vindicated. “Nebraska” went to No. 3 and was hailed by critics as a masterpiece of dark Americana. His next album, “Born in the U.S.A.,” elevated Springsteen to the level of global superstar.