Don't Watch 'Deliver Me From Nowhere' Unless You Want To Cry About Your Dad | Defector

"Deliver Me is adapted from Warren Zanes's 2023 nonfiction bestseller about the recording of Nebraska. The movie opens in 1981, as Springsteen, played by Jeremy Allen White, is onstage in Cincinnati with the E Street Band. He's finishing up The River tour, the 11-month, 140-show journey that hit 13 countries and made him a global superstar. The movie seeks to show how fame and Freudian foibles almost crushed him."

"Cinematic portrayals of real modern rockers sometimes suffer from comparisons to the real thing. For example, all the buzz I heard about Bohemian Rhapsody, the 2018 feature film about Queen, was how filmmakers really nailed the band's Live Aid set. But I'd already seen lots of video of Queen's 1985 Wembley performance before the movie came out. I didn't find Bohemian Rhapsody's replication nearly as thrilling. Obviously, anybody hankering for vintage Springsteen performances can find more than they can watch on YouTube."

"Writer and director Scott Cooper avoids that obstacle by making Deliver Me more of a psychodrama than a rockumentary. Springsteen's own music is a teeny part of the movie. Sure, you get great big helpings of classics like Sam Cooke's "The Last Mile of the Way" and "Boom Boom" by John Lee Hooker. But the E Street Band shows up only briefly in the opening scene, and again while recording the title track to Born In The USA, and that's about it."

Deliver Me From Nowhere adapts Warren Zanes's 2023 nonfiction book about the recording of Nebraska. The film opens in 1981 with Springsteen, played by Jeremy Allen White, finishing the 11-month, 140-show River tour in Cincinnati. The filmmaking centers on Springsteen's mental state as fame and Freudian family issues threaten to overwhelm him. Music appears sparingly: covers by Sam Cooke and John Lee Hooker feature prominently while E Street Band appearances are brief. Nebraska songs arrive in short snippets, with "Atlantic City" cutting off ten seconds in after a reference to the Chicken Man bombing.

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