Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere cuts deep as an intimate portrait of Springsteen’s life, capturing the emotional struggle that shaped his legendary Nebraska album – a raw, haunted acoustic record, with dark, stark lyrics about highways and loners, all-night drives and lovers on the run, searching for a reason to believe. Rather than recapping Bruce’s decades-long career, writer & director Scott Cooper focuses on the soul-searching moment when the rock star turned inward and found Nebraska.  

A silent, troubled, closed-off young artist, on the cusp of global superstardom, struggling to reconcile the pressures of success with the ghosts of his past, Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) rents a home in the woods of Colts Neck, New Jersey, and effectively barricades himself into a bedroom where he obsessively watches Terrence Malick’s Badlands on a loop, reads Flannery O’Connor, and feverishly writes the anguished songs that would form the seminal 1982 folk album.

Based on Warren Zanes’ book Deliver Me from Nowhere that acknowledges Springsteen’s Nebraska as a turning point in music recording history, a stripped-down collection of intimate sketches, captured on a four-track TEAC 144 and released more or less as it was, imperfections and all.  Springsteen relied on Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser) to mix and a water-damaged Panasonic boombox for playback.  The film captures the conflicts the tape caused for manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) and recording engineer Chuck Plotkin (Marc Maron) as they battled to have the artist’s recording produced in the truest form it was created.