Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere Movie Review (2025)

A respectable biopic about two years in the singer’s life, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere offers excellent insights into his music creation, but doesn’t grip you with his story.

I don’t know a lot about Bruce Springsteen. I have always enjoyed his music on the radio, but I don’t know anything about his life, loves, or journey. I just know that he’s always seemed like an authentic, decent dude. So when I heard that this film was coming out, I was looking forward to learning his story.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere begins in 1981, as Bruce Springsteen is beginning to become very popular. With his close friend and manager, Jon Landau, at his side, he begins to research and write songs that will end up becoming the album “Nebraska.” During this time, he dates a single mother named Faye, and reflects on his tumultuous relationship with his parents, feeling that he had to protect his mother from his mentally unstable father.

This drama brings a very heavily melancholic tone to the entire film. It runs the spectrum, sometimes feeling slightly lighter and other times heavier, but if you are meant to feel the weight of Springsteen’s depression at the time, it works. He struggles, no matter what he is creating or who he is trying to connect with, and that is communicated clearly with the audience.

You learn about his father, with implications that he was (at the very least) verbally abusive and an alcoholic, and that Springsteen learned to step in on behalf of his mother and help to retrieve his father from various bars over his lifetime. There is also a scene where dad takes young Bruce to the movies to see The Night Of The Hunter, about a criminal chasing children down for money he is trying to take from them. The nastiness of the movie “bad guy” while sitting with his father makes for an interesting correlation.

Jeremy Allen White does a great job as Springsteen, with his stoic facial expressions and quiet curiosity, whether speaking or just observing. It’s a great casting choice, and he should get props for the role.

The biggest issue that I had with the film is that I found myself detaching from it fairly regularly. I never got bored, but I was never overly curious where the story was going either. This is very much a slice of life film, so it moved pretty slowly, while also hovering in the space of his growing depression and spiraling out.

I would have loved to learn more about his childhood or a time before 1981, but that isn’t what this film is. It is about a time in his life where he wrote great music and isolated himself.

Overall, if you are a fan of Bruce Springsteen and his music, the coverage of the devotion that he has to the creation of something “real” is great, and Jeremy Allen White does a nice job bringing him to life, but the story itself is a little lacking. In the end, it’s worth watching and you will be entertained, just don’t hope for more than what it is.

Runtime: 119 minutes

Motion Picture Rating: PG-13

Languages Spoken In The Film: English

Should You Watch It? Yes

Did I Cry? Nope

My Rating: 3/5 Stars

Available: Currently in theaters