Cinematic Springsteen

The place where The Boss, John Ford, and Terrence Malick meet

Consider me shocked but I thought the trailer for Deliver Me From Nowhere looked pretty darn good, and I’m a person who believes four out of five music biopics are absolute trash. Jeremy Allen White has the chops, it’s got David Krumholtz, and Jeremy Strong further boosts his case for best turtleneck wearer in the game. Gaby Hoffman plays ma Springsteen and Stephen Graham is his dad? Yeah, I’m in.

But maybe most importantly is that the film doesn’t look to be the whole Springsteen story awkwardly squashed into 120 minutes, and it doesn’t seem like it will rely on too many of the tropes Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story brilliantly parodied. Instead, it centers on The Boss going back to basics in the early 1980s when he created the sparse masterpiece he’d title Nebraska, an album that took its time to become one of the great myths in the Springsteen storybook. It barely resembled the Wall of Sound-soaked Born to Run or bombastic Born in the USA, and the album’s influence really started to gain notice nearly two decades after its release. There was the 2000 Badlands: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska on SubPop that featured the likes of Ani DiFranco, Ben Harper, and Son Volt covering tracks from the album; Johnny Cash also contributed his own version of “I’m On Fire,” which Springsteen wrote around the same period. Not long after that, artists like Iron & Wine and Bon Iver started utilizing the same quiet, lo-fi acoustic arrangements that Springsteen used for Nebraska, and that’s around the time when a new generation who previously maybe only knew The Boss from radio or MTV started digging into his catalog. I’ve always thought the reappraisal of Nebraska at the start of the millennium was what eventually gave way to younger groups like Arcade Fire or Gaslight Anthem to borrow some of Springsteen and the E Street Band’s other tricks.

Although there are literally entire books made up of writing on Springsteen (not to mention his own memoir), Nebraska is one that I find writers tend to obsess over the most, and they usually come up with some of the most poignant thoughts about Springsteen’s work when talking about it. I always think it’s because it's an album that feels so personal and solitary that it reminds writers about their own working process. The previous albums were collaborative with his band, but Nebraska is just him. The writer Niko Stratis put it well when she told L.A. Review of Books that “When you think about him writing Nebraska (1982)—it’s so desperate for something to change, and to not always have to be the architect of that change, but just wanting to be made new—it’s such a visceral feeling.”

Nebraska is also Springsteen’s most literary album. He was pegged early with the whole “Next Bob Dylan” rock poet thing, but even he’s admitted that some of the lyrics from his early albums don’t entirely make sense. In the 2005 documentary Wings for Wheels: The Making of Born to Run, there’s a part where he’s singing “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” a song that’s literally about how the E-Street Band came together, when he says of one of the lyrics, “I still have no idea what it means. But it’s important.” I don’t think he could say the same about any lyric on Nebraska. For my money, besides the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat, it’s the greatest collection of short stories as rock music ever.

Part of the reason, I’ve always suspected, is the stated influence Flannery O’Connor’s work had on Springsteen around that same time. These days, O’Connor’s stories seem like they’re mentioned as an influence on every third book or movie that comes out; I don’t know if that was the same in the early-1980s. Yet the thing I’ve always appreciated about Springsteen’s little musical tales of violence and heartbreak is that it’s all New Jersey, and not the haunted South that O’Connor wrote about. Usually I find that writers who use the O’Connor influence the best tend to be ones who are also from the South, Donna Tartt and Jesmyn Ward are the first two that always come to my mind first. Tartt’s characters and Ward’s use of the landscape both make me think of O’Connor and, of course, William Faulkner, and I’ve sometimes found people from the rest of the country might be missing something that Southern folks are born with that’s noticeable in writing. I’m not from the South, so I don’t exactly know what that is, but somehow, the Garden State’s favorite son captured it writing about (mostly) his home state, with detours through Michigan and place the record is named after.

There’s also a cinematic feeling you can’t shake while listening to Nebraska, which is part of the reason I’m so interested in Deliver Me From Nowhere (a lyric borrowed from the album’s eight track, “Open All Night.” There’s the obvious connection to Terrence Malick’s 1973 film Badlands, which Springsteen has talked about before as a massive influence on him, and the title track that opens the record is basically the song version of Malick’s film that was loosely based off Charles Starkweather’s 1958 killing spree. But there’s also whatever Sean Penn saw in the record’s fifth track, “Highway Patrolman,” that made him want to write and direct 1991’s The Indian Runner. The film isn’t that easy to find these days, and if it comes up in conversation it’s usually because Steve Bannon was the movie’s executive producer, but I love the way Penn took the source material and turned Springsteen’s song into a film that David Masciotra wrote,“is a movie of profound ambition. It seeks to dramatize nothing less than the history of violence within the United States, and how that violence infects spirit after spirit, like a powerful and contagious disease.”

You can also see Nebraska in other movies that came before and after it: you almost feel like Robert Mitchum’s knuckles from The Night of The Hunter could pop over a fence at any moment, or maybe the desperation of John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath suddenly comes over you. Maybe you’re listening to it while driving and it suddenly feels like if you take one wrong turn you’ll find yourself in some creepy town from John Huston’s 1979 Wise Blood. All of those call to mind Nebraska for me, and I think it’s in large part to the fact that they all connect to fiction writers Springsteen would echo in some of his best work from 1982 and on: James Agee (The Night of the Hunter), John Steinbeck, and O’Connor.

Wise Blood (1979)

As for what came after Nebraska, you have The Indian Runner, but there’s also something in down-and-out has-beens of Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (2008), the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, and Scott Cooper’s Wild Heart (2009) that feels very Nebraska to me. The latter especially makes sense since Cooper was tapped to direct Deliver Me From Nowhere. And that ultimately is what has me excited about the biopic, that I believe Cooper has an understanding of the nuances of what makes Springsteen and his music, but specifically Nebraska, so iconic. The last 25 years has seen no shortage of Springsteen hero worship in great movies and shows, from The Boss showing up for a few moments of High Fidelity to references to his work in shows like The Sopranos and Billions. I don’t think that’s what Cooper wants from this film, and more importantly, I’m not sure it’s what Springsteen wants from a movie about his life. His story is out there for all of us already, and simply dramatizing it so a few people could get into Oscar contention doesn’t feel like the sort of move Springsteen would make. Instead, Deliver Me From Nowhere could serve as yet another way to understand one of the greatest American storytellers of the last few decades.