Last Exit Before Superstardom

Bruce Springsteen writes happy music with sad lyrics. The exceptions to this are the two 1980s albums that sandwiched his happiest record of all. Born in the U.S.A., which came out in 1984, was preceded by Nebraska, from 1982, and Tunnel of Love, from 1987. Tunnel of Love is more than sad. It sounds like tricyclic antidepressants set to music: minor chords and moany lyrics in a padded cell of synths and numbly metronomic drum programming. Nebraska is also more than sad. It is tragic, and bare and raw where Tunnel of Love is overstuffed and dull.

These effects are more sonic than lyrical. Many of the songs that ended up on Born in the U.S.A. were written at the same time as the songs that went on Nebraska. The Nebraska songs were released in their original form, four-track demos that had been bounced down to a Maxell cassette. The E Street Band inflated the Born in the U.S.A. songs for the stadium tour that made Springsteen a superstar. According to industry logic, the Born in the U.S.A. album and tour should immediately have capitalized on the popularity of The River and its sellout tour of indoor arenas. But when Springsteen came off the road in September 1981, he was unsure if he still wanted what he had worked so hard to get and wondered if he had sold out enough. Nebraska, the least commercial album he could have put out, was a last act of self-sabotage and self-affirmation before he accepted the fate he had sought.

Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is two stories about Bruce Springsteen in 1982. One relates the making of Nebraska, which Springsteen recorded on a TEAC 144 four-track home recorder in the bedroom of a rented house in Colts Neck, New Jersey. The other invites us to empathize with Springsteen as he struggles with fame, love, and CBS Records. In the first thread, an unconventional person surprises himself and produces an uncanny American classic. The second thread is conventional and told without imagination. Cooper cuts between black-and-white flashbacks to Springsteen’s unhappy childhood at the hands of his bullying, drunken father Douglas (Stephen Graham, playing to type) and an uncommitted romance with a Jersey girl and single mother named Faye Romano (Odessa Young, making the best of a few bad lines).

Jeremy Allen White’s Springsteen is uncomfortable with the success he has won, fearful of what he will lose if he wins more, and unable to articulate anything without a guitar in his hands. He has just broken the hockey arenas of the Midwest. He has topped the Billboard chart with The River. He has finally had a hit single, “Hungry Heart,” whose tinny mix and leaden delivery suggest a new openness to the lowest common denominator and the bottom line. Donna Summer wants to record “Cover Me.” Much like Taylor Swift’s recent Eras tour, The River has shown that Springsteen is a money machine capable of carrying the music business in a time of economic uncertainty. Of course he is miserable.

Deliver Me from Nowhere is adapted from a book by Warren Zanes, who used to play guitar in the Del Fuegos. No previous film captures the unbearable alternations of the musical existence: the violent switchback between the noise and nerves of live performance and the silence that follows, the endless motion that gets into your bones and then suddenly stops. The movie opens with a delirious “Born to Run” on the last night of The River tour, then cuts to Springsteen in a silent rental, fingers twitching with adrenalin. You can hear his ears ringing and his mind counting down the hours till the showtime that isn’t coming.

“The quiet can get a little loud,” Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau tells him. Landau is the invisible partner in Springsteen’s success, the only link between what remains of his private life and the looming monster of public fame, and the only person to understand both. Jeremy Strong plays Landau with the intensity he brought to Kendall Roy in Succession, only Landau is a winner. The suits at CBS want more of the same; David Krumholtz delivers light relief as Al Teller, a crass executive in a three-piece suit and a combover. Landau knows he gets nothing if he fails to secure what’s best for Bruce. Bruce is no longer sure what he wants or who he is.

The visual palette mixes the dead-leaf oranges and browns of the Northeast in winter and the wall-to-wall carpeting of the 1970s with the cold blue of a lifeless sky. Springsteen tries to reconnect to his life by buying a new sports car and driving around New Jersey, sitting in at the Stone Pony, taking Faye Romano on a date to the boardwalk at Asbury Park and loitering around his childhood home at night. But his mind is still way out West. The title track for Nebraska picks up where “Badlands” left off in 1978, with the story of the serial killer Charlie Starkweather, as mythologized in Terrence Malick’s movie of that name. In a nice touch, Cooper shows Springsteen altering the crazy loner’s confession from the third person to the first.

“Hey ho rock ’n’ roll, deliver me from nowhere,” Springsteen sings on “Open All Night.” Jeremy Allen White shows us the inner processes of thinking and listening, which are not easy to communicate. The feeling of Springsteen’s alienation and brooding becomes the sound of Nebraska. When Springsteen feeds the demos through an old Electroplex tape echo, we hear both his distance from the world and the sudden, unmanageable distortions of intimacy when he contacts it. The lonely whoops on the tape go into the red, then fade into the echo like a horn in the night on the highway.

Nebraska is desperate and lonely music, a lo-fi work of high fidelity to American roots. The ghostly Electroplex echoes where it all began, in Elvis Presley’s recordings in the Sun Records shopfront for Sam Phillips, and where it all led, for John Lennon’s vocal signature was a sonic effect, created by the slapback and sung with that in mind. “New Jersey in the morning like a lunar landscape,” Springsteen sings on “Open All Night.” When he takes the demos to the E Street Band, most of the songs don’t work. He realizes that he has caught their spirit on the Maxell cassette, and Landau believes him. The sequence in which the engineers struggle to transfer the cassette to vinyl and Landau convinces CBS to put out an album without a tour, a single, or promo interviews is gripping.

Landau quotes Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood: “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. … In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.” Success isolated Springsteen from the world, and he reconnected through other people’s art. Nebraska sounds like folk music, but it is really post-folk, an image of a lost America reassembled from O’Connor, Steinbeck, Malick, and Jimmie Rodgers. The movie struggles to capture this, and slips into painful literalism.

A flashback of Douglas Springsteen showing the proto-Bruce a mansion on the hill leads to big Bruce writing “A Mansion on the Hill.” We see his father’s house a lot, so no surprise he writes “My Father’s House.” Despite the opportunities for roadkill in Bruce’s nocturnal drives, we don’t see the dead dog that the narrator of “Reason to Believe” sees. The same banal obviousness accompanies Springsteen’s journey to Los Angeles, where he weeps in a psychiatrist’s office and reconciles with his father in a Chinese restaurant.

“I’m finding my way,” a sweaty Bruce tells a tearful Landau when he comes off stage in Los Angeles on the Born in the U.S.A. tour. There is always a way: As the Allman Brothers 1975 compilation double-album put it, The Road Goes On Forever. But there is no “I” anymore. Springsteen delivered himself from nowhere by accepting that he could not go home, that he was no longer the same person, at least to everyone he once knew and who once knew him, and that survival meant playing a character called “Bruce Springsteen.”

The hug with Landau leads to Springsteen hugging his mother, and then an audience in his dressing room with his father, who beckons 32-year-old Brucie to sit on his knee. Bruce says he’s never done that. His father seems surprised. So are we. In “My Hometown,” one of the tracks that Bruce’s stadium tour is promoting, he sings, “I’d sit on his lap in that big old Buick / And steer as we drove through town.” The first-person is no longer the person we think he is. These closing scenes present psychoanalytic closure as the tolerably unhappy ending for a “scared and lonely rider,” but they also show there can be no closure on life. Like the loners in Nebraska, Springsteen has played out his loser’s fate and will travel alone forever on the lost highway.

Nebraska was one of the few albums in which a major rock artist turned the tables on his audience and the music business. Bob Dylan did it with the electric A-side to Bringing It All Back Home in 1965, though he gave his public the folking good time they expected on the B-side. John Lennon did it with the Plastic Ono Band album in 1970, though only with the lyrics, for the music sounded like White Album-era Beatles covers. Lou Reed did it with Metal Machine Music in 1975, but that was unlistenable, just as Reed intended. David Bowie consistently pretended to turn the tables but only came close on the all-instrumental B-side of Low in 1977.

Nebraska was the least compromising of all these uncompromising albums in an art form so compromised that most of the time it’s barely an art at all. No major artist has dared to mess with the golden goose since Nebraska, so we can safely say that it stands alone. It went to No. 3 regardless, so everyone was happy in the end. Everyone, that is, except its author. But he wasn’t happy to start with.

Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

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