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An elegy for noise and a hymn for silence, capturing the grace of a man rebuilding himself through song.

A review by Ioanna Gousiopoulou

Not so much your typical jukebox biopic, Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025) is a respectful contemplation of the isolation an artist experiences, the paralyzing quiet after success, and the stubborn grace of starting again. The film does not span decades like most such biographies. Instead, it delves into one winter of the early 1980s. This was the period when Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White), already an embodiment of American restlessness, sequestered himself in a small New Jersey house with a four-track machine and a pile of blank songs that would become Nebraska (1982). The movie pulses at the rhythm of a slow-motion heartbeat: subdued, deliberate, and brimming with the noise of creation.

Cooper’s enduring fascination with masculine vulnerability is evident in his unique approach to filmmaking. He shoots with an unusual patience, capturing the essence of the genre. He favors muted colors and glacial pans. The Jersey winter, rather than being portrayed as bleak, is presented as a process of purification —a stripped-down landscape. This is the opposite of the typical montages that boil musical legends down to mere bullet points. Instead, we are treated to close-ups of a retreating mind: a messy living room doubling as a studio, the flicker of a light on scribbled lyrics, the creaks of floorboards after long recording sessions. Every detail is a testament to the respect for the process. The movie acknowledges that sometimes, art is born in silence, not action. The most revolutionary thing for someone who has made so much noise is sometimes to remain quiet.

Thematically, the movie is an artist’s portrait and a flashback to the era that gave birth to Springsteen. The America of the early 1980s lingers at the edge of the frame, with factories closing and endless highways. It is in what the characters breathe. Springsteen’s loneliness becomes the national mood: disappointment turning into strength. Beneath the surface, the film is not about an album at all but rather about what it means to keep searching for meaning when the world feels empty.

The screenplay, adapted from Warren Zanes’s Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska (2023), avoids obvious narratives. Rather than chasing success or love, it seeks truthfulness, which comes with confrontation. Dialogue is sparse but highly rhythmic. Springsteen does not use a metaphor when he says the recordings sound “like ghosts trying to tell me something.” He is giving a confession. His bandmates, manager, and producer speak the language of expectation, while Bruce speaks the language of displeasure. The movie’s pulse is in the tension between these dialects.

Beneath its quiet rhythm, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is also a film about depression —about the slow, invisible kind that seeps in when success no longer fills the silence. Cooper treats Springsteen’s struggle as part of the creative landscape that hums beneath every note. Depression does not always arrive as a breakdown but as exhaustion, a numbness that makes even beauty feel distant. Allen White plays that weight with restraint, not through grand gestures but through stillness —the way Bruce stares too long at nothing, how he hesitates before answering simple questions. It is a portrait of a man trying to locate himself again, to remember that joy can exist without applause. The remarkable thing is that the film finds dignity in that struggle; it respects mental illness as the shadow that gives the light its shape.

The film feels like a memory, full of grain and weight. Cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi, a longtime collaborator of Cooper’s, shoots on 35mm, capturing light in a soft, melancholic manner that gives the movie a lived-in look with a ghostly edge, as every frame could be an overhandled, aged photograph. The sound design in the background is a softly muted masterwork. You can feel fingers on guitar strings, the turn of the tape reel, and the empty breath before the lyric starts. The Nebraska demos, emerging from the same exposed space, are not polished soundtrack introductions but raw, authentic reports.

The film earns its low-key ending by the time the last shot comes: a serene morning drive with the master tapes in the passenger seat. There is no applause to save the story; only the rumble of the engine and the first light on the windshield remain. In telling Springsteen’s story, Cooper cuts an alternative path through the minor, steady miracle of hanging on. Sometimes the bravest sound an artist can make is the one they hum in the dark.