Two years ago, film director Scott Cooper and writer Warren Zanes were summoned to Bruce Springsteen’s house in New Jersey. In a sense, the meeting was a surprise: as Cooper notes, Springsteen was known for “saying no to every overture about making a film of his life since 1986”. But something about the screenplay Cooper had written had clearly piqued his interest. It was based on Zanes’ book Deliver Me from Nowhere, not a traditional career-spanning biography, but a forensically researched history of Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska, which Zanes calls “the greatest left-turn performed by someone who is operating at the top of the charts in musical history”.
Released between Springsteen’s first US No 1 album, 1980’s The River, and the world-conquering Born in the USA in 1984, it was a stark, lo-fi collection of demo-quality home recordings made in the singer’s bedroom while he was battling depression. Its songs were haunted by the ghosts of the 1950s teenage serial killer Charles Starkweather and the Italian-American mobster Philip Testa, and by Springsteen’s strained relationship with his father, a remote, hard-drinking blue-collar worker, whose paranoid schizophrenia was only diagnosed later in his life.
