There’s a fitting circularity to the fact that the new Bruce Springsteen biopic, Deliver Me From Nowhere, focuses on the creation of his 1982 record Nebraska. After all, the album begins with a scene straight out of a movie. “I saw her standing on her front lawn / Just a-twirling her baton,” sings Springsteen in the foreboding opening lines of the title track. “Me and her went for a ride, sir / And 10 innocent people died.”
The New Jersey rock icon wrote those words after seeing Terrence Malick’s 1973 neo-noir Badlands, which features a scene where Martin Sheen’s troubled greaser first encounters Sissy Spacek’s character twirling a baton on her front lawn. The film was loosely based on a real-life 1958 murder spree in Nebraska and Wyoming carried out by 19-year-old Charles Starkweather, who went on the run with his 14-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate.
