A few questions for you, gentle readers: What’s the last musical biopic you saw? Did you see it in a theater, at home, or both? What’s the last musical biopic you rewatched?
Because maybe it’s just me, but of all the musical biopics I’ve reviewed on this blog, I’m hard-pressed to remember a single one. Much less a movie I’ve rewatched or wanted to rewatch. (Hell, the last non-musical biopic that I watched was The Smashing Machine, and that was out of my head within 48 hours.)
Last year brought us no less than three musical biopics of note, yet Bob Marley: One Love and Back to Black both tanked. The only one that got any traction was A Complete Unknown, which grossed $140 million against a reported $70 million budget, got a bunch of Oscar nominations without winning a single one, and then vanished right back into the ether.
Come to think of it, musical biopics are more or less the ultimate corporate product: Built to lure in consumers with a popular lead actor and a nostalgic brand, make everyone feel good in the moment, and then leave them hungry for more. Even the best musical biopics nowadays are built to last until the next awards season and no later. It’s a genre of empty calories.
So here we are with Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, yet another dime-a-dozen awards-bait musical biopic. I know Jeremy Allen White is a marvelous up-and-coming talent, I know Scott Cooper can work wonders with this material, and I know the subject has a rich musical history. What else is new?
No, seriously, what about this movie is new? Is there anything at all to separate this movie from its peers in the genre? Is there any reason why people would be discussing and rewatching this movie in a year?
I saw this movie because that’s how the timing worked out, but I kept on hoping that it would give me something worth writing about. That’s all I asked for. And I did indeed get something I hadn’t expected: Another movie in an increasingly long list of biopics that should’ve been documentaries. (See also: Concussion, Dark Waters, etc.)
The film opens with the conclusion of Springsteen’s iconic The River Tour in 1981. From there it chronicles the conception and production of his “Nebraska” album, released the next year. As depicted in the film, Springsteen (here played by White) is right on the cusp of international stardom. Which means the record labels and corporate execs are eager for new hit singles to get him over that hump while Springsteen finds himself caught in between his small-town Jersey roots and the sweet millionaire life he doesn’t know anything about.
Part of struggling through this identity crisis means addressing his daddy issues. Stephen Graham plays Douglas Springsteen as a lonely, emotionally distant, frequently abusive father. The kind of guy who sincerely means well, yet he’s so emotionally incompetent that he never had any business being a father.
Finally, Springsteen hears about Charles Starkweather and his infamous killing spree throughout Nebraska in 1957. (The events were immortalized by debut director Terrence Malik in the film Badlands, with Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek starring.) The newspapers of the time described Starkweather as a young man driven to serial homicide because he was angry at the world.
Sufficiently inspired, and eager to record without corporate pressure (and also to cut costs), Springsteen proceeds to record an acoustic album about some dark subject matter, all on multi-track cassette tape, in his bedroom. He proceeds to insist that the tape be released exactly as is, putting the audio engineers through seven layers of hell as they try to find some way of duplicating the low-quality tape onto vinyl record fit for mass consumption.
Springsteen further insists that the album be released with no singles, no press, no tour, and no promotion of any kind. The corporate suits take this about as well as you’d expect. Especially since this is also the period when Springsteen wrote and recorded some of his most promising songs (“Glory Days”, “I’m Goin’ Down”, “Dancing in the Dark”, freaking “Born in the U.S.A.”, etc.) within this same time period. And all of them are indefinitely shelved until Springsteen gets his vanity project finished to his satisfaction and out the door on his terms.
Even under all these conditions, “Nebraska” eventually hit #3 on the charts. The shelved songs were promptly released on the “Born in the U.S.A.” album in 1984 and the rest is history.
The film details the thought process into making “Nebraska”. It details everything that made “Nebraska” new and groundbreaking, as deeply personal as it was difficult to produce. Here’s the problem: None of that translates into a satisfying story.
A central requirement with any telling of any story is to sell the illusion that the ending is not a foregone conclusion. This is far more difficult — and arguably more important — with established stories and real-life stories in which the ending and aftermath are common knowledge. The audience has to believe in the moment that things might not work out the way we want or expect. And this movie fails that test.
Springsteen is a newly-minted music star in rural New Jersey, so everybody treats him like royalty and gives him everything he wants. Even in New York City, he gets everything he wants because he’s a generational artist on the rise. Sure, the corporate executives grumble about how this is a huge mistake, but the universal attitude is “We’re going to give Springsteen what he wants even though we have no idea what the hell he thinks he’s doing.”
At no point in the story does Springsteen come across any kind of meaningful resistance. At no point is there any reason to believe that the album will fail in one way or another. There’s no tension here, which doesn’t make for a good story.
The other big problem is the nature of our protagonist. Any good story is driven forward by what the protagonist wants. In this case, we’ve got a protagonist with no idea what he wants, and his primary motivation is to find out what he wants. That is notoriously difficult to pull off. Nine times out of ten (and this is one of the nine), it results in a plot without any direction or momentum because our driving character is lost behind the wheel.
And then we have the love interest. Faye Romano (Odessa Young) is a single mother working as a waitress and she strikes up a doomed romance with Springsteen. There are a number of problems here.
First of all, as with everything else in this movie, the development of this romance arc is predictable from start to finish. If you’ve ever seen any musical biopic before, you already know that Springsteen is going to neglect the love interest while he’s buried in his work and you can figure out the rest from there. Secondly, Faye and Springsteen are supposed to fall in love pretty much immediately. Despite all the best efforts from everyone involved, the chemistry to make that happen simply isn’t there.
Thirdly, it bears repeating that Springsteen’s traumatic history with his father is a huge part of this movie. And now Springsteen is dating a woman who comes with a young daughter. This could’ve been a perfect chance for our protagonist to directly address his own family history and whether he could possibly be a better surrogate husband/father than his own dad was. Yet the film does nothing with this angle until the end, when it’s too little and far too late.
Perhaps most importantly of all, there is no Faye Romano. She did not actually exist. This character is fictional and this entire romance arc was invented for the movie. The filmmakers invented an entire romance arc out of whole cloth, and this was the best they could come up with. That is exceedingly damning.
Watching Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, it’s perfectly clear that the filmmakers had their hearts in the right place. They wanted to make a movie about a singer grappling with mental health, family trauma, and the stress of potential stardom, working through all of that in the process of making an album like nothing anyone else ever could have made, so radically different that nobody had any idea what to do with it. It’s not a bad story, just a badly told story.
The themes come through loud and clear, and the film sufficiently conveys the importance of the artist and the album. But the plot is fundamentally broken, void of tension or conflict, with only the thinnest of motivations driving the story forward. If the filmmakers had put all this time and effort and passion and research into making a documentary about the topic, I’m sure it would’ve been stellar.
As it is, we’re left with yet another dime-a-dozen awards-bait biopic. Something nobody will remember or think about this time next year. This one is for the awards season completionists, and I’d be amazed if even they remember it in a few months.