[COLUMN] Deliver Me From Nowhere is a So-So Study of an Artist, But a Love Letter to His Producer | by Darren Mooney

NOTE: This piece contains spoilers for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, although that warning implies the film might contain some element of surprise. It’s mostly a functional paint-by-number biopic looking at the development of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, a frustratingly conventional account of the production of a very unconventional album. Still, I managed to find something to appreciate in it.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is a love story.

However, it is important to be clear. Deliver Me From Nowhere is never particularly interested in the romance between Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) and Faye Romano (Odessa Young), a fictional character created as a composite of a number of different women that Springsteen dated during the period covered by the film. Faye’s role in the narrative is rather thankless, to serve as the romantic partner of a tortured artist working through his own demons while recording an album.

The central love story at the heart of Deliver Me From Nowhere is between Springsteen and his manager, Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong). Landau is obviously a hugely important figure in Springsteen’s life and career. He championed Springsteen as a music critic and he worked as executive producer on every Springsteen album between Born to Run in 1975 and the double header of The Human Touch and Lucky Town in 1992. Landau is generally recognized as a major artistic – and not just commercial – influence on Springsteen.

In this way, Deliver Me From Nowhere is similar to Benny Sadfie’s The Smashing Machine. The Smashing Machine is a biopic of professional fighter Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson), but features a thankless role for his then-girlfriend and future-ex-wife Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt), where the film suggests the real love story is between Kerr and his professional buddy-and/or-rival Mark Coleman (Ryan Bader). Both Deliver Me From Nowhere and The Smashing Machine are movies featuring girlfriends who exist largely to reinforce how much their male leads love their creative passion.

Deliver Me From Nowhere is in many ways a traditional music biopic. In fact, it is at its least interesting as a traditional music biopic, going through the motions of unpacking the personal traumas that spurred Springsteen to record the album Nebraska. This trauma is expressed primarily through a series of black-and-white flashbacks exploring Bruce’s deeply troubled relationship with his father (Stephen Graham).

At times, despite its earnest sincerity, Deliver Me From Nowhere cannot help but evoke Walk Hard. There is a sequence in which Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser) arrives at Springsteen’s rental house to find him listening to the album Suicide by Suicide. The camera pans over the album cover. Mike asks what Springsteen is listening to. Springsteen answers, “Suicide.” At one point, researching his album, Springsteen goes to the library and scrawls notes like “Why??” and “Double Album?”

This is what makes Landau such an interesting character in the context of an otherwise formulaic musical biopic. In most of these stories, the manager is inevitably presented as some sort of deeply cynical and exploitative villain: Paul Prenter (Allen Leech) in Bohemian Rhapsody, Nigel Martin-Smith (Damon Herriman) in Better Man, Doc McGhee (David Costabile) in The Dirt. John Reid pops up as a villainous manager in both Bohemian Rhapsody (Aidan Gillen) and Rocketman (Richard Madden).

In contrast, Landau is presented as a steadfast champion and supporter of Springsteen. When Springsteen decides to deviate from the traditional path to rock superstardom by recording an acoustic album inspired in large part by the Starkweather homicides, Landau privately expresses his own anxieties about the unconventional move to Springsteen, but he also works very hard to protect and preserve Bruce’s creative vision.

Deliver Me From Nowhere makes it clear that Springsteen was not always the easiest person to work with. He is clearly uncomfortable with his own stardom. He seems constantly on edge, even around old school friends like Joey (Jeff Adler). He is, by his own admission, not particularly fair to Faye and her young daughter Haley (Vienna and Vivienne Barrus). He gets into heated arguments with recording technicians like Chuck Plotkin (Marc Maron).

There is not necessarily anything radical in this approach. The musical biopic is often a study of a fractured and confrontational genius who is misunderstood in their own time, fighting to make themselves heard. The interesting twist that Deliver Me From Nowhere puts on that template is the emphasis that it places on the relationship between Springsteen and Landau, which is built on mutual trust and respect and which never falters over the course of the film.

Deliver Me From Nowhere treats Landau as an ambassador for Springsteen, articulating for the artist and navigating the dynamics that Springsteen refuses. Springsteen refuses to explain Nebraska. He insists that the album should be released without any singles or interviews or press or tours. Within the narrative of Deliver Me From Nowhere, Landau serves as the public face of Nebraska, defending it from executive Al Teller (David Krumholtz) and explaining it to his own wife Barbara (Grace Gummer).

Tellingly, it is Landau who delivered the infamous “hole in the floor” metaphor monologue that was central to the movie’s publicity campaign and was cut from the movie itself, putting Landau in the position of explaining the subtext of the biopic to the movie-going audience as well. Two of the most unintentionally funny sequences in Deliver Me From Nowhere suggest that Jon Landau was the first person in America to mansplain Nebraska to his loving and patient wife.

Of course, it makes sense for Landau to serve as a champion of the artist. Before he worked as a producer, Landau was a music critic. He is not just a businessman. He is an individual with taste. He doesn’t just produce music, he understands its context and its meaning. Landau doesn’t see his role as facilitating the production of more mass media to profit the larger Columbia Broadcast System, but instead as a collaborator who is making it possible for something beautiful to enter the world.

This is not necessarily the most cinematic relationship imaginable. There is a sense that Deliver Me From Nowhere is not sure how much weight it can put on the dynamic between Springsteen and Landau. In particular, the inclusion of the romance between Springsteen and Romano feels like a false compromise. Still, perhaps because it feels so strange within the framework of an otherwise paint-by-numbers biopic, the partnership between Landau and Springsteen is a highlight of the film.

Part of this is undoubtedly down to the performance. Landau is played by Jeremy Strong, one of the most consistently reliable character actors working today. Strong is very good at playing characters with a real sense of interiority. Strong is one of those rare actors where it’s really interesting to just watch him think on screen, and so Landau's relative passivity and his lack of theatricality become strangely compelling. Strong plays Landau as a man taking a leap of faith, who may or may not believe in Nebraska but definitely believes in Springsteen.

In this context, it feels notable that Deliver Me From Nowhere came from 20th Century Films, the subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company that used to be 20th Century Fox. Last year, their indie arthouse division, Searchlight, was responsible for the Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, which was also a movie about the relationship between creativity and the establishment within mainstream music.

This balance between art and commerce is a recurring motif within awards contenders from the studio that was once Fox. One of the company’s last big successes before being swallowed by Disney was Ford v. Ferrari, a movie that was in large part about the need to balance the demands of a creative process with the commercial realities in which they exist. It is interesting that this theme should recur so frequently within the studio’s output.

It's also hard not to think about The Studio, the recent sitcom streaming on Apple TV+. In one of the show’s core moments, featured in both the first episode and the trailer, newly promoted studio executive Matt Remmick (Seth Rogen) laments, “I got into all of this 'cause, you know, I love movies, but now I have this fear that my job is to ruin them.” The first episode of The Studio finds Remmick trying to greenlit a new Martin Scorsese (himself) film, only to end up killing it.

Rogen claims that quote was inspired by a joke made by real-life studio executive Steve Asbell, who now runs 20th Century Studios at Disney. For the record, Asbell reportedly denies the quote and Rogen is on the record describing Asbell as “a lovely guy.” It is certainly a self-aware joke rather than an anguished mea culpa. Still, it perhaps speaks to the anxieties simmering through the contemporary studio system. How do executives guide good projects through hostile waters?

It’s also worth acknowledging Asbell has arguably done a much better job maintaining consistent quality under Disney than other major division heads. He has helped steward Dan Trachtenberg as creative head of the Predator franchise. He let Kenneth Branagh have his fun with his Poirot trilogy. Under Asbell’s guidance, 20th Century quietly produced some of the best direct-to-streaming features of the pandemic era, such as Karen Maine's Rosaline or Brian Duffield’s No One Will Save You.

In this context, Landau feels like a sort of wish fulfilment figure for the executives working in a film industry that has become increasing commercialized and hostile towards creativity, as various studios have been swallowed (and spit out) by larger conglomerates that seem to care little about the actual art of filmmaking. Landau loves the work that he does and the people that he works with, and understands that his function is to preserve and enable creativity in the face of outside intervention.

Writers and directors deservedly get a lot of credit for the films that they make. It takes real talent and vision to will something like Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another or Ryan Coogler’s Sinners into being. However, there is perhaps an argument to be made that some small measure of credit should also go to the executives and producers within the studio machinery who protected and enabled those films, such as Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy – particularly in a climate that seems openly hostile to such films.

Of course, “a music biopic about how great Bruce Springsteen’s manager was” is probably a tough sell to mainstream audiences. Indeed, the box office returns suggest that even a Bruce Springsteen biopic was a tough sell to viewers. Still, it’s the most interesting aspect of Deliver Me From Nowhere, in large part because it feels like such a strange departure from the standard rhythm and tempos of a film like this. It’s an approach to the business of creativity that is rarely explored on screen.

It's a shame that Deliver Me From Nowhere couldn’t manage to fit in more of this.