I happen to be a fan of Bruce Springsteen, though probably nowhere near as much as the hipster bitch that I once shared an “executive” office with when I ran my college newspaper. For our all-night marathon sessions where we’d prepare the weekly edition she’d lug her quadrophronic stereo (yeah, it was THAT long ago) into our layout room and blast 8-tracks at full blast in order to give her the energy and motivation to even be approachable enough so that we could get done the task at hand. She also had an uncontrollable stutter that would flare up when she was excited, which a merely a chord from his guitar could provoke. To this day I can’t think of him without hearing her wailing “B-B-B-B-B-BRUUUUUUUCEEEEE!!!!” in the recesses of my brain.
So I was predisposed to wanting to like Scott Cooper’s biopic SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE, which debuted in theatres nationwide this weekend. After all, it’s taken this long to bring any part of his compelling story to the big screen at all, and one could easily make an argument that B-B-B-Bruce was at least as meaningful to the 70s as Bob Dylan was to the 60s, and in the wake of how his origin story played out last Christmas, both in terms of box office and awards, it was certainly in theory a viable concept to tackle. And I expected to get a soundtrack at least as familiar as the one I heard incessently every long winter night while trying to safely scrape glue off my fingertips with a dull Xacto knife.
Yet when the trailer dropped and I learned what the actual focus of the film was I couldn’t hide my disappointment. Not only are many of his more populist anthems such as TENTH AVENUE FREEZEOUT and, of course, BORN TO RUN, nowhere to be found, but even the timeline it does cover was conflated, as USA TODAY’s Asbury Park-based scribe Patrick Ryan pointed out earlier this week:
“Deliver Me From Nowhere” traces the son of New Jersey (played by Jeremy Allen White) as he creates the most introspective album of his career, 1982’s “Nebraska.” But the new movie also mines the origin story of “Born in the U.S.A.,” a deceptively joyous, widely misinterpreted anthem about a Vietnam War veteran returning home to financial hardship and neglect.
In 1981, writer and director Paul Schrader approached the Boss about writing the title track for his music drama “Light of Day,” which was originally titled “Born in the U.S.A.” Springsteen declined to participate in the film, but still decided to use that title for a song he had been writing about a disillusioned vet. He recorded a solo acoustic demo of the track at his home in New Jersey, but the song was shelved after co-producer Jon Landau suggested that it didn’t gel melodically with the rest of his “Nebraska” album. (He eventually released the demo on his 1998 compilation album “Tracks.”
“
Deliver Me From Nowhere” follows the emotional journey of “Nebraska,” but Cooper ultimately thought “Born in the U.S.A.” was integral to the biopic. At the time, Springsteen was grappling with whether he should make “Nebraska” a double album. “He was like, do I include ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ on that as an acoustic (track), which he now says he wishes that he had?” Cooper says. “Even though Jon Landau and everybody who heard it thought this is going to be an iconic song, Bruce said, ‘No, we’re not releasing that. We’re putting that on the shelf and releasing “Nebraska,” which is an incredibly personal and intimate record.’
Personal and intimate are hardly adjectives I would use to describe classic Springsteen, and the energy that Jeremy Allen White attempted to bring to the portrayal that I could glean from the trailer appeared to be blunted by the emphasis on the brooding, more melancholy version that DELIVER ME chose to emphasize. And for as decently as White’s interpretation is, even with the able help of SUCCESSION’s Jeremy Strong in the role of Landau, it doesn’t come close to the bar that Timothy Chalamet set in his channeling of Dylan.
I can therefore somewhat emphathize with the clear frustration that DEADLINE’s usually more objective Anthony D’Alessandro chose to inject into his look at the weekend box office that he dropped yesterday morning:
Distrib sources are complaining that the World Series is cutting into male moviegoers this weekend… While we’re on the subject of bad release dates for what should be older skewing male movies: 20th Century Studios’ Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere which has now shifted its range to $9M-$10M (many are seeing $9M) after a B+ CinemaScore in fourth with Universal/Blumhouse’s Black Phone 2 second weekend ahead in 3rd with $12M (-56%). If Springsteen hits the bottom of its tracking range at $9M, it won’t be “Glory Days” for this net $55M Jeremy Allen White-Jeremy Strong starring production…Why isn’t this brand-name rock performer movie not being released over Christmas ala last year’s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown when a bigger audience is available?
Hand raised…uh…maybe because 20th knew what they had wasn’t all that worthy of such a window? If you’re Disney, would you risk siphoning off even a sliver of the box office potential of the latest iteration of AVATAR? And in light of the thoroughly underwhelming performance than the attempt to resurrect the TRON franchise sputtered to earlier this month, there’s that much more pressure for the studio to deliver results.
And I subscribe to the very simple theory that if it’s that difficult to make a compelling and inclusive trailer to whet the appetite of someone geographically and demographically predisposed to wanting to see something the actual movie just might not be worthy of such a risk.
D’Alessandro did cite this datecdote to support his second-guessing: On the upside, the movie has a 60% definite recommend on PostTrak, so we’ll see if this improves. I would remind him of the tepid 5.9/10 IMDB and so-so 74% RT and 65/100 Metacritic metrics that also are floating out there. There’s apparently more out there in my camp than his. In fact, I probably come closer to the regrettable conclusion that BOSTON.com’s Kevin Slane drew:
When a bevy of record executives question the commercial appeal of “Nebraska” in the movie, you can imagine director Scott Cooper facing a similar line of questioning about his vision for this film. “Deliver Me from Nowhere” tries to subvert the conventional biopic template by slowing down and telling a focused, highly personal story. But the result is a film that drags unnecessarily while still unable to break free from the trappings of its genre.
Still, a subject this iconic and, fortunately, still very much alive to willingly consult with filmmakers has other stories from his rich past that can be told. I, for one, would love to see a true origin tale, taking us back to the days where he was a young South Shore rebel performing with Southside Johnny and (as my effervescent office mate called them) the Asbury J-J-J-Jukes.
I kinda wonder what she might be thinking about all this. She was a lot more appealing when she’d let her hair down rocking to B-B-B-Bruce.
Until next time…