Collar? Popped. Hands? Deep in the pockets of a leather jacket. Posture? Hunched somewhere between man and folding chair. Jeremy Allen White makes for a perfectly convincing Bruce Springsteen in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. Slide some brown contacts in there, and his soulful, kicked-dog expression can do the rest; hand him a guitar and he’ll croak out the side of his mouth like his voice, too, is rising straight up from the New Jersey soil.
Scott Cooper’s film is about the genesis of Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska, made at what everyone thought would be the height of the artist’s fame, off the back of 1980’s chart-topper The River. Instead, he rebuked all that with an intimate, folk-rooted ode to the blue-collar worker that consolidated his artistic integrity, all while Columbia’s executives snapped feverishly at the gates.
