FILTER SCREEN
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere ★★★★
Dir: Scott Cooper
Getty/Chris Walter
20TH CENTURY STUDIO. C
Nebraska
-era biopic digs into the Boss’s dad issues, finds nerd-friendly gold.
“Man makes record in bedroom” does not sound like a pitch to get Hollywood salivating, but to Scott Cooper’s credit his film stays close to what’s small-scale about this chapter of Springsteen’s story. He’s helped hugely by Jeremy Allen White’s portrayal of Bruce as a man paralysed by new-found fame and haunted by his non-relationship with his father. He doesn’t do much, but what he does – rocking out with the E Street Band at the end of The River tour, neck veins bulging; communing with guitar and TEAC as the quiet, strange songs of Nebraska take shape – he does magnetically. Even the fanciful stuff – the love interest that is, at best, a ‘composite’ – is inoffensive: of a piece with a rock biopic that’s unusually respectful of music nerds, noting Nebraska touchstones Suicide and Night Of The Hunter. There’s even an insider gag about outtakes. What next? Scott Cooper does The Basement Tapes? Yes please!