US media outlets Deadline and Variety are reporting Bruce Springsteen and his manager, Jon Landau, are involved with A24 productions in the making of a new narrative feature film about the creation of his stark masterpiece Nebraska. Jeremy Allen White, star of The Bear and The Iron Claw, is reportedly top choice to portray Springsteen with talks underway.
The movie provisionally titled Deliver Me from Nowhere, will be written and directed by Scott Cooper, no stranger to music cinema with his debut film 2009’s Crazy Heart a gritty tale about an alcoholic singer-songwriter starring Jeff Bridges.
The movie is adapted from 2023 Warren Zanes’ book of the same name which featured in Best Music Books of the Year lists for several Rhythms writers.
Released in 1982, at the time Nebraska was something of an outlier in Springsteen’s catalogue, electing to release his 4-track demo recordings rather than the reworked arrangements recorded with the E Street Band. These included Born in The USA which went on to conquer the charts across the globe a couple of years later as the title track for Springsteen’s next album.
This is not the first time Nebraska has been tapped for the big screen, with Sean Penn adapting the song Highway Patrolman, about two brothers on different sides of the law, into the 1991 film The Indian Runner.
This is something of a full circle moment for Nebraska, as Springsteen has been very forthright around the influence of noir cinema in the creation of the record, specifically Terrence Malick’s 1973 film Badlands, which like the title track is a re-telling of the Charles Starkweather murder spree.