There tends to be two distinct approaches a director can take when making a music biopic: a career-spanning story that touches on every aspect of the musician’s life or a more focused tale honing in on one particular chapter in extra detail.
Scott Cooper’s new film Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere – which stars Jeremy Allen White – opts for the latter option, chronicling the recording of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska and exploring some of the personal issues he was facing at that time, some of which were rooted in childhood trauma.
“I wanted to keep the timeframe as tight and narrow as possible,” Cooper explained during an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com. “It’s really only a few months of Bruce’s life.
“But I felt if I told the story well, then people would get a better understanding of Bruce Springsteen, paradoxically, then if I had told a cradle to kind of present day narrative.”
Read on to find out just how accurate the portrayal of this period is.
How accurate is Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere? True story explained
Cooper based his script on the non-fiction book of the same name by Warren Zanes, and so the film largely sticks to true events as they happened – albeit with the usual condensing (and a couple of fictional additions) that we usually see in films of this time.
The bulk of the narrative presents events truthfully: it is true that Springsteen recorded Nebraska in cassette tapes in his home and wanted to keep this stripped back sound for the finished record, while it’s also true that the record label – Columbia – had some reservations about the album and had to be persuaded of its merits by Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong).
Meanwhile a number of other small details are true. For example, Springsteen really did get the title of his landmark hit Born in the USA from a Paul Schrader script and recorded the song in the middle of the Nebraska sessions before initially shelving it.
Furthermore, the scene in which Bruce breaks down in a therapist’s office after being told by Landau he needed to seek professional help is based on a story Springsteen himself told in his 2016 memoir Born to Run.
Springsteen also at times had a difficult relationship with his father – who was an alcoholic and bipolar – and he has gone on the record to praise Stephen Graham’s performance in the film, telling BBC Radio 2: “Stephen’s such an incredible actor and he just immediately inhabited my father’s physicality and inner emotion. He captured my dad’s struggles and spirit really well.”
Indeed, Springsteen has generally been very enthusiastic in his praise for the film, suggesting that it is – on the whole – a fairly accurate portrayal of his life.
However. one fictional aspect is the character of Faye Romano (Odessa Young), Springsteen’s lover in the film who is not based on any one real person but is rather a composite character inspired by various women in the singer’s life.
“I kind of just approached her like any fictitious character,” Young explained of Faye during an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com. “There were some references in Deliver Me from Nowhere – in Warren Zanes’s book – and there were some references in Bruce’s memoir to people that he dated, or women that he knew – no one specific but just like little mentions.
“So I kind of mined that for some information, and also just Scott’s script. You know, Scott had a vision of Faye, and that was very real on the page. So I got really lucky that I just got a good script and a well-written character.”
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is now showing in UK cinemas.
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