Film and Expanded Nebraska set offer new insights into the Boss, his creativity and his life.
By Michael Goldberg.
It’s 1957 and Bruce Springsteen is 8 or perhaps 9 years old. His father, Douglas, drives Bruce and his sister Virginia out to a cornfield where they can see a mansion on a hill. It’s a place they’ve come to before. Looking across the field and up at the place as the kids run through the corn, Douglas says a house like that would cost “a small fortune.”
“If you lived there all your problems would disappear,” he adds wistfully.
He’s wrong, of course, and as Bruce Springsteen would learn many years later, money (or an expensive house) don’t solve your problems.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, the film that takes place in the early ‘80s while Springsteen records the Nebraska album (with many flashbacks shot in black and white, to when he was a boy, some showing his father abusing him), is mostly about the emotional problems the rock star has spent his life suffering. It is an intense and powerful drama. I saw it twice; it was great the first time and even better the second. It’s based on musician/writer Warren Zanes’ brilliant book, Deliver Me from Nowhere; The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. Jeremy Allen White is perfect playing Springsteen while Jeremy Strong is excellent as Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau.
In his book, Zanes recalls an interview with Springsteen in which the writer says, “And Nebraska, as you describe it, was a return specifically to childhood, to childhood trauma. That’s a triggering place, for anyone who might have that in their past. With those songs, you went there and stayed for some time. You moved back in.”
Springsteen responds, “Yeah, I would say that that’s true. And obviously that’s what’s going to happen if you’re going to go into that past the way I did. You know? I think it was the first time, pre-analysis, of a deeply investigative period of my life, where I started to question what’s the matter with me. Something’s wrong, something’s not right, I’m having a really hard time placing myself in this world. That was the first thing that came out. That record as the first thing that came out when I started to go back and question my own sense of place, who I was, what I was doing, where I came from, that was the music that came out….”
Zanes’ Nebraska book, which was out of print, has been republished, and a five disc (four CD/one Blue-Ray) boxed set, Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition, of unreleased Nebraska demos, live audio and a live video of a recent performance of the Nebraska album, has been released, both to coincide with the film’s release. Nebraska ’82 includes the legendary electric recordings that Bruce and the E Street Band made at the Power Station in New York before Bruce decided he was going to release the 9 demos he’d made at his rented house on a 4 track TEAC Tascam 144 Portastudio (which records to a regular cassette tape) as his follow-up to The River. There is also a remastered version of Nebraska and both the audio on CD and the video on Blu-Ray of a performance of the Nebraska album, in sequence, made with no audience present by Springsteen in the spring of 2025 at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, New Jersey.
The first CD contains demos that weren’t included on Nebraska. It starts with a fantastic acoustic version of ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ that I like a lot better than the rock version on the Born in the U.S.A. album. Bruce sings rather than screams, and there’s a catchy vibe to his acoustic guitar playing. It’s great to hear other previously unreleased demos like ‘Losin’ Kind’ and a mellow version of ‘Pink Cadillac.’ Still, Bruce made the right decision leaving them off Nebraska. The songs he did include are finished in ways some of those left off aren’t, and the songs included go together, which is why Nebraska is such a powerful album, almost a concept album.
The electric Nebraska tracks on Disc Two are interesting to hear, especially a version of ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ with Bruce playing electric guitar, Garry Tallent on bass and Max Weinberg on drums, and a rockin’ ‘Atlantic City,’ but none are as good as the four-track demos. It’s obvious why Springsteen didn’t want to use them. The live video of the songs, directed in black in white by Thom Zimny (who has made many films and videos with Springsteen), is as stark and downbeat as the original Nebraska album, but it’s great – Springsteen is on, and he delivers with both his singing and playing. The focus is totally on Bruce, but he is accompanied by musician Larry Campbell (guitar, mandolin and tambourine) and keyboardist Charlie Giordano, who play from the shadows.
The box set is good, something that serious Springsteen fans who love Nebraska will want, but the Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere film is extraordinary. Essential viewing. It was directed by Scott Cooper, who has made many films, but who I particularly admire as the director of Crazy Heart, the wonderful 2009 film starring Jeff Bridges as an alcoholic country singer/songwriter whose career is just about over. Cooper knows how to make films about troubled musicians and once again he has pulled it off.
Like the book, the film details how Springsteen came to release an album of what were essentially demos as his follow-up to The River. It also shows us how Springsteen deals with his growing stardom – The River was, at that point, his most successful album. After The River tour is over, we see him at a Chevy dealership buying his first new car, a 1982 Chevy Camaro Z28. As he sits in the car, one of the salesmen tells him the car comes with an excellent cassette deck. “I might like it better if it had a record player,” Springsteen responds. Still, he buys the car, and later in the film buys his first house.
Deliver Me From Nowhere tells a moving story about Springsteen’s early ’80s nervous breakdown. It’s beautifully photographed and the color palette — blues, browns and oranges dominate — and dark atmospheric settings perfectly capture the surprising sadness of his life at the time.
We get to see what Springsteen’s relationship with his manager Jon Landau (a former rock critic who in 1974 famously wrote, “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen” back before they got in business together) is like. They are business associates, of course, but also good friends. “Coming off the road has never been easy for you,” Landau says to Springsteen shortly after The River tour ends. Many of the scenes with Landau show us Springsteen’s relationship to the music business – he’s trying to make art, not hit records, but manages at times to do both. We also see how Landau has helped Bruce grow as a person over the years.
There’s a lot of pressure for Springsteen to become more commercial, something he’s not ready to do. Director Paul Schrader wants him to star in a film with Robert De Niro; Sony wants an album filled with hit songs; Donna Summer wants to duet with Springsteen on ‘Cover Me.’ “I’m trying to find something real in all the noise,” Springsteen tells Landau, referring to the serious work he’s doing on songs for his next album.
“You find something real, I’ll deal with the noise,’ Landau says. “That’s my job.”
There is a terrific scene near the end of the film when Landau visits Bruce at a house Bruce is renting in Colts Neck, New Jersey and plays a Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers record for him. Greil Marcus wrote about that scene in his Real Life Rock column. “Landau puts on the Soul Stirrers’ 1955 ‘Last Mile of the Way,’ with Sam Cooke, before he was, as they called it, turned out as a pop singer – going far beyond anyone else’s last mile – and you hear the quiet on their faces, their understanding that the music they’re hearing is beyond anything they will ever do.” Only Marcus is wrong, I don’t think that’s what either of them are thinking. And already Springsteen has made records just as great: ‘Born to Run,’ ‘Thunder Road,’ ‘Rosalita’ and others. For me, the scene shows a wonderful aspect of Springsteen and Landau’s friendship: their shared love of great music.
To add additional human interest to the film (and provide further insight into Bruce’s emotional problems), Cooper has Springsteen fall in love with a young woman named Faye Romano, a fictional character with a young daughter. We see their relationship develop only to fall apart because Springsteen is unable to confide in her.
“Where you came from is gone,’ Landau tells Bruce, “and where you thought you were going was never there.”
Bruce decides to move from New Jersey to a house he has bought in Los Angeles. His friend Matt Delia drives him there. Along the way they stop in El Paso and as they walk around the El Paso County Fair, Bruce’s nervous breakdown kicks in. We see Bruce sitting in the passenger seat of Delia’s car, in shock, while we hear Delia on a pay phone with Landau explaining what happened. When they get to LA there’s a phone conversation between Landau and Springsteen. We get the idea that Bruce is contemplating suicide. Landau thinks Bruce needs to see a psychiatrist and finds one for him. “Tell me as much or as little about what brought you here today,” the shrink says at the start of their first session, at which point Bruce starts crying.
After that, text on the screen tells us it’s ten months later and we see that Bruce has gotten himself together, is touring again and starting to experience the success of Born in the U.S.A. which will make him a superstar.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is in cinemas now. Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition is available via Sony Music.