Nobody will be more surprised than me that I quite liked Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, because I hate biopics as a rule. Also, the film’s previews seemed to indicate that the movie would mostly consist of a sweaty Jeremy Allen White of The Bear playing Bruce Springsteen by striking triumphal poses in front of huge sellout stadium crowds, as befits “the Boss.” Clearly the marketers are aware of the biopic most Springsteen fans would prefer to see. As for me, I’d run long and hard to avoid seeing a movie like that.

But this Springsteen movie is all about Bruce the depressive, headed for a breakdown while he creates the determinedly lo-fi, downbeat album Nebraska, which absolutely nobody wants from him. It seems like this is also a movie nobody wants, judging by the underwhelming box-office numbers.

But my eyes lit up at the very thought of that movie scenario. Praise Jebus, that’s nothing like the typical biopic!

Based on the Warren Zanes biographical account Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and directed by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Black Mass, Antlers), Springsteen keeps a tight frame on the year 1981–82, when the singer-musician-songwriter was just cresting in national fame after his Born to Run tour but not yet ascending further to global superstardom with the Born in the U.S.A. album full of banger hits.

In this interlude, Springsteen is both loyal to and mentally trapped in his hometown area of New Jersey, where he’s flashing back to his rough childhood and drowning in guilt at everyone he’s leaving behind as his career rockets upward. He embeds himself in his house in Colts Neck, and other than regular trips to the Stone Pony in Asbury Park to play with the house band, he stays in his bedroom working on the songs that eventually make up the now-revered album Nebraska.

His inspirations are telling and very period-specific. While watching the horribly crappy TV of the era and switching channels to avoid all the commercials, he lights onto Terence Malick’s masterpiece of American mayhem, Badlands (1973), just at the point when young Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) and teenage girlfriend Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek) — slightly fictionalized characters based on real-life murderers Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate — set fire to her father’s house in the heartland and commence their killing spree. Haunted by memories of his own wretched childhood and his parents’ miserable lives, Springsteen watches with unholy personal fascination the burning of the house that obliterates the corpse of the father.

I can’t emphasize enough the importance of this scene of Springsteen’s dark inspiration, because it was such a particular way that TV made an inadvertently enormous impact in the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s. I was raised on this kind of viewing. I also ran across Badlands in the same way. The greatest and most disturbing movies ever made were slotted in daily between shoddy game shows and ridiculous soap operas and rotten cartoons, and they were generally cut to ribbons by thousands of commercials. The fragments of them hit you out of nowhere with tremendous power augmented by all the junk surrounding them.

That’s how I got to be a cinephile. That’s how the Coen brothers and Martin Scorsese and who knows how many other filmmakers got their initial film educations. And apparently, that’s how Springsteen became obsessed with Badlands and Charles Starkweather and began the process of composing Nebraska.

There are other elements in the film that also evoke certain aspects of this period covering Springsteen’s present struggle and flashbacks to childhood suffering very accurately. Springsteen, age seventy-six now, is quite a bit older than me, but there were horrible aspects of American culture of the 1950s through ’80s that hung on like herpes.

On Springsteen’s bedroom wall, for example, in a prominent place over the bed, there’s a godawful paint-by-numbers version of Thomas Lawrence’s Georgian-era romantic beauty clad in a flowing pink dress, known as Pinkie. It was so mass-produced an image of that time period that, when matched in company with Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, representing a fashionable blue-clad young man of 1770, it broke out in homes everywhere like a rash, as home decor in the form of lamps and figurines and framed completed jigsaw puzzles, as decorations on cookie tins, drinking glasses, and playing cards. My parents had both Blue Boy and Pinkie paintings on their walls, the same terrible paint-by-numbers versions for hobbyists, throughout my own less-than-delightful childhood.

Springsteen’s comically self-deprecating old crony Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser), who comes to Bruce’s house to do a crude taped sound mix of the songs he’s working on, is made uneasy by the way Springsteen lives in such sparse discomfort in threadbare furnishings from the past — presumably his past, inherited from his parents. The Pinkie painting over his bed is the keynote of it all. Mike asks Springsteen when he’s going to cover that thing up with a rock band poster or something: “It gives me the creeps!”

In short, somebody (or several somebodies) on the film’s creative team is paying attention to the meaningful details in this account of Springsteen’s long-extended dark night of the soul. And though this film is in no way flashy — it’s a solid adult drama, no more — it achieves a surprising emotional power if you can tune into its wavelength.

The performances are all very good, and a few are just great. British actor Stephen Graham gives a spare, heartbreaking performance as Springsteen’s father, Douglas, an alcoholic who became violent when drunk and was ultimately revealed to be mentally ill. The movie does an admirable job of demonstrating that, though it seems we’re focused on Springsteen’s trauma and the way he was nearly lost to suicide, it gradually slides past him to reveal that it’s his father who was truly lost, which is an ongoing torment to his son.

Douglas Springsteen’s working-class despair is perfectly conveyed by Graham in wordless scenes of him sitting dead-eyed at bars and kitchen tables, nursing beers, dragging hard on cigarettes over ashtrays full of crushed-out stubs. In flashbacks to the 1950s, he often looks at his small, anxious, hollow-eyed son Bruce (a very affecting Matthew Anthony Pellicano) as if he didn’t recognize him.

Australian actor Odessa Young as Faye Romano, Springsteen’s girlfriend during this fraught period, is so compelling as the bruised Jersey girl and disillusioned single mother working at a local diner that when Springsteen inevitably dumps her, I thought indignantly, “You fool.”

The excellent performances by Hauser as Mike Batlan and Jeremy Strong as Springsteen’s friend, manager, and record producer Jon Landau are more expected but still demand notice. Strong, who just gave a terrific, skin-crawling performance as nightmarishly corrupt and corrupting lawyer Roy Cohn in the 2024 biographical takedown of Donald Trump, The Apprentice, is equally engrossing here as this shrewd, angsty, and dedicated supporter of Springsteen. His unflattering turtleneck sweaters, a bid to look suave that clashes with his big nerdy plastic glasses and fussy speech patterns, combine to make him seem like a real person in a way that most movie portrayals don’t achieve.

Of course, I have no idea if he’s like the real-life Jon Landau — I’m not enough of a Springsteen fan to judge the accuracy of any of these portrayals, in fact. But they all serve the verisimilitude achieved in this film. Jeremy Allen White, though he doesn’t particularly resemble Springsteen, brings his own working-class antihero angst to a part he seems born to play. With his usual fanatical preparation, he’s gotten rid of his vein-popping, gym-ripped body in order to represent a young thirty-ish Springsteen of the early 1980s.

In short — and this is high praise these days — Springsteen is a well-done, serious drama such as used to be commonplace in American filmmaking and now is vanishingly rare. These kinds of films tend not to draw anymore, at least not as theatrical releases. People wait for them to arrive on television streaming services. Recent attempts to revive the form at the cineplex, such as The Smashing Machine, After the Hunt, and Anemone, have all crashed and burned.

Of course, there are always Academy Award nominations that tend to favor dramas in general and biopics in particular. This might revive the fortunes of a few of these films, including Springsteen. White will probably be nominated, and a few members of the supporting cast deserve to be. But even before that happens, the film is definitely worth catching in theaters. It’s a real fall film, somber in tone but with surprisingly strong colors coming through. It’s also an emotional workout (in a good way) for depressives — and you know who you are!