I have a difficult relationship with the rock star biopic. When the filmmaker is trying something that doesn’t feel so slavishly beholden to the biopic formula, the emotion and excitement of one of these stories can hit the way it needs to, and the movie can work for someone who isn’t familiar with the subject. However, too often, music biopics just tell the same tired story over and over again. So many of these films are basically indistinguishable from each other narratively – we have the rise, the fall, the redemption arc. Often there’s drugs or alcoholism or abuse, and familiar and tired messaging about the cost of fame. 

However, Crazy Heart writer/director Scott Cooper’s new film about Bruce Springsteen intrigued me, despite my knowledge of the subject being limited. Bruce Springsteen was before my time, and despite understanding why he matters in a larger pop cultural context, I never really got his whole thing. But Scott Cooper felt like an interesting choice for this, and The Bear star Jeremy Allen White felt like inspired casting. So I was open to this, if not exactly pumped for it. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere premiered at this year’s Telluride Film Festival, where it received a positive, yet muted reception. Having now seen the film, I can see why the initial Oscar buzz for it has died down, but it still has a lot I think fans of Springsteen will enjoy.

In 1981, Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) just wrapped his latest sold-out tour, but he’s haunted by demons he can’t quite articulate. His manager (Jeremy Strong) rents him a house in his New Jersey hometown while he begins to confronts troubling aspects of his past, including a volatile relationship with his abusive alcoholic father that dated back to his early childhood. The film follows the creation of his 1982 album Nebraska, his fight to get that album to the public, as well as an evolving romance with Faye (Odessa Young), a single mother from his hometown. 

To Scott Cooper’s credit, he’s avoiding a lot of the biopic tropes that have long exhausted me in this kind of movie. I feel like I say this every time a new music biopic comes out, but it seems like no one in Hollywood has seen the 2007 film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. The cliches that film parodied are largely still slavishly followed almost 20 years later. And while Deliver Me From Nowhere avoids a lot of them, it can’t help but fall into many of its traps as well. A lot of the story beats are painfully familiar, and even if you aren’t really familiar with Springsteen’s lore, it’s easy to see where all of this is going. But this film, more than anything, is about the creative process and dealing with internalized trauma, and that felt like a smart angle for this to take.

It also helps that Jeremy Allen White could not have been a better choice to play Bruce Springsteen. He’s nailing the look and the voice and the mannerisms in ways that feel effortless yet deeply calculated. I had to check after the film if White did his own singing here, because Bruce Springsteen has such a specific sound, and it seems like it would be incredibly difficult to pull that off successfully. I wouldn’t have minded if they dubbed his singing voice, but to my surprise White is actually singing for this film. But even more impressive is how specific and detailed White makes this emotional journey. The script isn’t exactly digging deep into the psychology of Bruce Springsteen, but it’s so clear White wants to find something genuine and true in his story. And without a performance of this level, everything in the film would fall flat.

In our supporting cast, we have Jeremy Strong as Jon Landau, Springsteen’s longtime manager. And Strong feels a little miscast here because this role is not tapping into what he does best. Strong is so good at playing the smarmy villain type, and this character is mostly earnest and genuine, so he felt like a strange choice. Paul Walter Hauser also appears as a recording engineer helping out with the Nebraska album, and unfortunately he’s underused here. Odessa Young as the character Faye, might be this film’s secret weapon. In a role that normally would only be the love interest, Young brings a warmth and a familiarity that makes you feel like this is a person with her own past and her own life. Her strong chemistry with White is essentially the beating heart of this story. Stephen Graham and Gaby Hoffman play Bruce’s parents, mostly in flashback, and both have some emotional, effective moments.

Scott Cooper’s script could definitely pack more of a punch. The film’s pacing is languid and slow,and while I was never bored, mainly due to the work Jeremy Allen White is doing, I could see this being a chore to get through for some audiences. I always prefer in a biopic when we focus on a shorter period in the subject’s life, rather than the birth-to-death approach a lot of biopics take. And based on Warren Zanes’ book of the same name, Cooper’s script focuses on the making of this one album, one a lot of fans will tell you is his most personal and introspective. And as a result, the film really wants to dig into his mental health and issues with depression. And ultimately, this is a film about a sullen, brooding, emotionally broken man that ends with him going to therapy, and that automatically gives this movie a few extra points. More movies should end with men going to therapy.

The filmmaking here is generally pretty striking. Cooper’s usual cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi returns, and he shoots flashbacks to Bruce’s childhood in black and white. This seems like a simple stylistic decision, but as the film goes on, you realize he’s repressing these childhood memories and they show up in the film like unwelcome flashes. And as a result, this feels more like a storytelling device rather than a stylistic choice. Stefania Cella and Kasia Walicka Maimone’s production and costume design, respectively, seems to get the details of this era correct, and everything feels detailed and authentic.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere isn’t subverting anything about the framework of the celebrity biopic in any meaningful way, but it successfully avoids a lot of the genre’s problems. And one of these films is only ever as good as the performance at the center, and Jeremy Allen White couldn’t be better. The pacing is a bit rough and the script could dig deeper into the subject’s life and personality, but you’ll walk away from the film thinking about the central performance, and it’s memorable enough to stick in your mind after the film has ended.