After giving us the image of Bruce excitedly flipping through microfiche articles about Starkweather at the library, the film settles in as White patiently begins to put the song “Nebraska” together. Much is made throughout the movie about the pitch-black nature of the songs Springsteen was recording; at one point, Landau—who went from writing about Springsteen to managing him—tells his wife that the songs sound like they’ve been made by a guilty man. The scene from Badlands hangs over the songwriting like a dark cloud; Spacek’s bedroom in the scene looks quite a bit like the bedroom in which the young Springsteen hides from his own angry father.
His father, Dutch Springsteen, isn’t portrayed as the lightly comical foil of the dad in the “Growin’ Up” tape. In flashback scenes shot in black and white, Stephen Graham does a lot of sitting at the kitchen table smoking, a lot of sitting on a barstool smoking, and a lot of yelling at his family. At one point, he drunkenly forces Bruce into sparring practice in the middle of the night.
But the relationship between Bruce and his father is the film’s true dramatic crux, far more so than his romance with the invented Faye Romano, who exists primarily as a mirror for Springsteen’s many issues. Rather than reduce the father-son relationship to fodder for Nebraska’s songs or overall mood, Cooper positions it as the primary issue of Springsteen’s life at the time and the source of a depression that grows more and more crippling as the film unfolds. White is at his best when he gives himself over to psychic pain.
While some of Nebraska is drawn from Springsteen’s personal life, most of the album is populated by nervous criminals, broken-down factory workers, fatalists, and racket boys. “Mansion on the Hill” carries a whiff of the Hank Williams classic of the same name, but where the country standard uses the titular image as a symbol of a woman who was “alone with her pride” after rejecting the singer, Springsteen eyes the mansion like it’s Jay Gatsby’s house across the water, a promise of abundance that’s held out but never delivered. Despite his claim that he had “no conscious political agenda or social theme” while making the record, it’s impossible not to also hear it as a critique of the “city on a hill,” the avatar of American exceptionalism first coined by John Winthrop in 1630 and repeated ad nauseam by Ronald Reagan.