SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE

Review by Rocco Simonelli

I’m a Springsteen fan. I was 14 when BORN TO RUN hit, and it was one of the first albums I ever purchased with my own money; the other was Dylan’s BLOOD ON THE TRACKS. All these years later I still listen to both. That’s important to note, because it’s impossible to watch the current Springsteen biopic DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE without thinking of Dylan and his biopic from earlier this year, A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. Springsteen was one of the many artists who came after old Bob who were dubbed by the music industry as “new Dylans.” On his 1992 album HISTORY, Loudon Wainwright III sings about this phenomenon in his song TALKIN’ NEW BOB DYLAN (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO6yGnpo64A

And the labels were signin' up guys with guitars, Out to make millions, lookin' for stars...

Yeah, I got a deal and so did John Prine, Steve Forbert and Springsteen, all in a line. They were lookin' for you, signin' up others,

We were new Bob Dylans, your dumb ass kid brothers! Well, we still get together every week at Bruce's house.

Why, he's got quite a spread I tell ya, it's a twelve step program...

Despite the “New Dylan” moniker, Springsteen couldn’t be less like him. Dylan learned early on the power of mystery. He never explained his songs or himself. There’s what the art you create means to you, and then what it means to the audience who chooses to experience it. Those two things can never be the same. David Lynch spoke at length about this whenever he was asked to “explain” his films. Stanley Kubrick was undeniably of the same mindset that the art spoke for itself. When asked what his drip paintings were supposed to mean, Jackson Pollock said, “If people would just look at the paintings, I don’t think they would have any trouble enjoying them. It’s like looking at a bed of flowers, you don’t tear your hair out over what it means.” Could Mark Rothko have told you exactly what any of his paintings were supposed to be conveying? He didn’t even give them titles.

Springsteen, on the other hand, has been telling us what his songs are about for decades. He’s written about them in books (his autobiography BORN TO RUN), explained them at length on TV (MTV’s Storytellers), on stage (SPRINGSTEEN ON BROADWAY), and in numerous film documentaries. He’s like the guy at the party who you casually ask how he’s doing, who then drones on for an hour in much more detail than you ever cared to hear. If Dylan is the Rothko of songwriters, content in his silence and indefinable abstraction, Springsteen is the Norman Rockwell, totally representational, with every element within the frame in sharp focus, and no ambiguity of meaning.

Only once did he deviate from such overt illumination, and it resulted in NEBRASKA, the album many consider to be his finest work. It’s a dark album, a haunted album, with a sound and a mood that feels as if it’s coming to us from someplace in the distant past, and yet it is also timeless; it exists in a place outside of time, if that makes any sense. To me it has always brought to mind Scott Fitzgerald’s CRACK-UP essay and his famous line that states, “In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.”

“I wanted black bedtime stories. If there's a theme that runs through the record, it's the thin line between stability and that moment when time stops and everything goes to black, when the things that connect you to your world – your job, your family, friends, your faith, the love and grace in your heart – fail you.” - Bruce Springsteen 2003

On its release, Springsteen did no press interviews for NEBRASKA, and did not tour in support of it. He wouldn’t even allow his face to be featured on the cover. It was a daring, potentially self-destructive career move for an artist who at that moment in time was on the brink of superstardom. But as DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE points out at its conclusion, it still managed to reach number 3 on the charts (though the film refrains from mentioning how quickly it then fell from those charts). But Springsteen’s reticence to throw a spotlight on the collection, to let it stand and speak for itself, to not talk it to death like he’s done with so much of his other work, allowed NEBRASKA to take on a life of its own, to grow in stature over the years.

But now, akin to Dustin Hoffman’s producer character in WAG THE DOG, Bruce just can’t help himself, and now must throw the spotlight on the making of NEBRASKA -- how he wrote the songs, why he wrote the songs, everything that inspired the songs, etc.

Which brings us back to Dylan, who has always understood that artists are magicians, and if you tell people how you do the trick, it ceases to be magic. It just becomes mechanical, a feat of engineering. And, worse, you cease to allow the audience to participate in the trick, thus negating the whole point of art, which is to evoke emotions and reactions but not to dictate them, like a stern parent proclaiming with unyielding finality, “Because I said so!” I don’t want or need Dylan to tell me who LIKE A ROLLING STONE is about or how or why he wrote it, because when I listen to it it’s always about me, it’s about how it makes me feel and who it makes me think about, just like Springsteen’s THUNDER ROAD or MY FATHER’S HOUSE is about me, or Leonard Cohen’s BIRD ON A WIRE, or Bob Seger’s NIGHT MOVES, or any of the songs that still give me chills when I hear them.

Anyway, the movie...

It’s a good movie, I suppose. It’s certainly not a bad movie. I just don’t think it’s a necessary movie. A COMPLETE UNKNOWN, as I wrote in my FIR review of it, justified itself by documenting a true turning point in American culture. Just as Hemingway in the 1920s changed the way people wrote prose, Dylan’s 1965–66 troika of electrified albums BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME, HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED and BLONDE ON BLONDE changed the way people wrote songs. There is no transition from The Beatles warbling “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah” to songs like A DAY IN THE LIFE without Bob Dylan. NEBRASKA is a great and lasting work, but it wasn’t culture-altering. It’s important in the Springsteen universe, but not so much the larger world. In how it’s depicted in DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE, it’s supremely important to Springsteen, and thus the film assumes we should hold it in equal importance. Even I can’t do that, and I love NEBRASKA.

DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE is a dour piece of work that is ultimately not really about the crafting of NEBRASKA, but rather the clinical depression of two men, Bruce Springsteen and his father Douglas. (Thus its lackluster performance at the box office.) Apparently, Springsteen doesn’t seem to grasp that sharing with us the true reason for his father’s rage and unhappiness -- paranoid schizophrenia, rather than being worn down and betrayed by the lie at the heart of the American dream -- undermines one of the most foundational themes of his songwriting.

But the weakest link in the film is the depiction of Springsteen’s longtime manager Jon Landau. It’s not Jeremy Strong’s performance that falls short, it’s the dialogue Strong is forced to deliver as Bruce’s unwavering artistic champion, which alternates between being blatantly expository and cringe-inducingly sycophantic. The character doesn’t utter a single word in the film that feels like an actual human being talking. Landau may have said all these things in real life, but whether he did or not, I still found myself clenching my teeth every time he spoke.

What is most effective in the film, despite their being the most conventionally “bio-pic,” are the black-and-white flashbacks of Springsteen’s childhood, but I must admit that perhaps they worked so well for me because they felt so familiar. Stephen Graham as Springsteen’s father, sitting grimly at the kitchen table drinking and smoking in unnerving silence, could be my own father, whose Korean War PTSD and ensuing unpredictable bursts of rage and violence were close if not equal to Douglas Springsteen’s mental struggles. Those scenes, along with those of Bruce’s mother, made me long for a film just about that, Springsteen’s childhood, and more specifically his mother, who was clearly the one who held their lives together (just as my own mother did with our family) and made it possible for Bruce to become the artist he became.

Repeatedly in the film we see Springsteen back home in New Jersey in 1981 following the success of THE RIVER tour, driving around in his new Chevrolet Z28 Camaro, and always he ends up parked in front of the house in Freehold in which he grew up, gazing at the old place, eyes welling with anguish and memory. Later in the film, in the throes of a full-fledged mental breakdown, he finally brings himself to seek help from a psychiatrist. As he wrote of the event in his autobiography, he sat down across from the therapist and broke down sobbing. It’s a powerful moment, and the film depicts it honestly. But I wish they’d gone just a little further and included something that would have brought the story so much more into focus and full circle. There is a YouTube video of a live Springsteen performance of one of his NEBRASKA songs, MY FATHER’S HOUSE (My Father's House Live at the Shrine, Los Angeles, CA - 11/16/90 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYDW1bIwIV4), in which he prefaces the song by talking about his habit years earlier of driving by and parking in front of his childhood home. He then shares that he went to a psychiatrist and asked why he was doing that. “What you’re doing,” the doctor told him, “was something bad happened. And you’re going back, thinking you can make it right again. Something went wrong, and you keep going back to see if you can fix it. And you can’t.”

Isn’t that the causation of most art, and much of what we do in life? That we’re trying to repair something in our pasts, in others, in ourselves? We can’t, but that doesn’t keep us from trying. The Springsteen in DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE is, if not a brother, at least a cousin to that other past-haunted hero Jay Gatsby, beating on against the current and struggling to be borne back into the past. And like Gatsby, he gets the mansion and the built-in pool. He just doesn’t end up floating dead in it. And we do get the songs of NEBRASKA. So, like Bill Murray muttered in CADDYSHACK, we got that going for us, which is nice.