‘Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere’ is Not Your Usual Biopic

Why does anyone want to see a biopic on Bruce Springsteen? Granted he’s a prolific rockstar who sold more than 140 million records and has been performing for over 6 decades, but what aspect of his life is worth telling?

Writer/director Scott Cooper, a lifelong fan of “The Boss,” found the key to telling Springsteen’s story and it came from discovering a point in the singer’s life when he was writing his Nebraska album. Cooper saw Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere as a chapter in Springsteen’s life after he came off a sold-out world tour and the high expectations of writing his next hit album. This chapter also coincided with some unrealized mental illness which fostered his desire to write Nebraska.

Cooper’s film, which stars Jeremy Allen White, jumps between two time periods in Springsteen’s life: one as a young boy who observes his father’s abuse and alcohol dependence, and the other as a man in his early-30s who struggles with creating an album that bears his soul and another that is all but guaranteed to be commercially successful.

Here are some ways Cooper told the story of an icon and how screenwriters can use it in their scripts.

The struggle with drugs or alcohol, the fall from grace and the sudden flash of genius inside the recording studio – while these are some tropes in many musician biopics, Cooper takes a different approach and purposely avoids many of the tropes that come with the genre.

“I think other people will have to tell me if I have completely avoided those music biopic tropes,” Cooper said in an interview with Music Week. “So often we see in music biopics the ascent to fame, addiction, the fall and rise again. Well, I wanted to avoid all of those tropes, and I did so by simply telling Bruce’s story as truthfully and honestly as I could, which is to find Bruce at his lowest and most vulnerable – a man who doesn’t even know that he’s suffering from depression, but is very slowly and quietly unravelling.”

It's not that Cooper avoided all tropes though because there are always some similarities amongst musicians, such as writing the songs, playing in concerts and recording in studios. There are also the creative struggles artists face and internal conflicts.

Not only is ‘E Pluribis Unum’ on the United States seal on the back of the one-dollar bill, it’s also a way to approach character creation.

Toward the beginning of the movie, Springsteen meets Faye (Odessa Young), a young single mother outside of the Stone Pony, a club he plays at for fun. Faye just so happens to be the sister of someone he went to high school with and they hit it off. She becomes the love interest in the musician’s biopic. The only thing is, she’s a fictional character. Out of many potential women in Springsteen’s life around this time, she became one character.

This is a tactic used frequently in any story based on real life or events. For the sake of the story, it wouldn’t make sense to have a few women come in and out of Springsteen’s life, but rather a pivotal supporting character who has an arc and can help tell the protagonist’s story.

Cooper adapted the screenplay from the book Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska by Warren Zanes. The focus of the book is how Springsteen went about creating Nebraska, which consisted of dark, moody songs – a complete opposite of his album The River that came before and Born in the U.S.A. which came after.

It was obvious that Springsteen was reaching for something and was putting his career on the line to grab onto it. Simply, he was trying to figure out who he was.

What the film represents is a man suffering from mental illness. It manifests itself throughout the film and supporting characters comment on Springsteen’s behavior. There is constant talk about them being worried. However, these supporting characters also witness his writing the Born in the U.S.A. album. So, the characters see both a man struggling with “something” but also that same person who was writing hit songs.

As the film shows, Springsteen had a difficult childhood, "exacerbated by the fact that my father was plagued by mental illness most of his life," Springsteen says in a Hollywood Reporter interview. "And my family was filled with mental illness, my aunts, my uncles, my pop, and it just was in our blood, so I had to deal with it too."

That’s the heart of the story and the theme that drives every scene: the struggle of mental illness when you may not know what it exactly is.

Movies tend to have both external and internal conflicts. Audiences tend to be more engaged when two people are at odds with one another versus a character struggling with something inside. The idea of showing internal conflict was a challenge that Cooper faced with the movie.

“The biggest challenge with the drama of Nebraska (the album Springsteen was writing) is internal,” Cooper said in an IndieWire interview. “There’s really no band. There’s no evil producer we see in films. There’s no real tension apart from Al Teller (David Krumholtz), the head of Columbia Records, telling Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) they can’t play this…But the big question for me is, how do you make solitude cinematic? You’re not shooting a film filled with concerts or crowds. You’re shooting stillness in a man wrestling with how honest he can be in his work.”

In movies, the actor can’t really do this on their own. Cooper doesn’t just place a camera on White and the magic happens. It had to be built up. This is accomplished through flashbacks to when Springsteen was a boy, conversations before those moments of solitude, and moments of inspiration where Springsteen is writing his two albums. The audience can’t see the performers’ thoughts so they must have a means to empathize with the character, which is built on information the filmmaker provides.

Springsteen wrote a song based on the movie Badlands, a 1973 thriller starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. He had seen the poster, then started watching the movie and finally researched the people behind it, which became the basis for the song Nebraska.

There were other moments that inspired his art as well, such as visiting a mansion on a hill.

Inspiration can come from anywhere. As artists and creators, it’s our job to keep our minds open to the muse whenever it shows. Whether it’s traveling back to the town you grew up in, reflecting on moments in your past or seeing something in a movie that kick starts an idea for your own screenplay, it’s important to always be receptive to the world around you and, as Springsteen says in the movie, “Find the real in all the noise.”

“People have ownership over Bruce Springsteen because I know people who have seen him 140 times...I’m realizing this film is not what people expected. Now whether it’s what they wanted is another thing,” Cooper said in his IndieWire interview.

Springsteen fans have a preconceived notion about who their favorite rockstar is. It’s one of the things Cooper understood when taking on the project. Imagine writing a biopic on Taylor Swift as she was writing one of her albums – it’s an almost impossible task.

As a screenwriter, it’s important to realize that people have their own ideas around people and events. Whether a biopic on a celebrity or political figure or an event like the 9/11 or the Vietnam War, the screenwriter will have to accept that the story they’re telling may not align with the perception of the audience. That’s okay – Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere compared with other musical biopics goes against expectations, and shows there is more than one way to tell the story of a rock idol.