Why Deliver Me From Nowhere Barely Features Bruce Springsteen's Famed E Street Band

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If you go into "Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere" expecting a lot of concert scenes, prepare for disappointment. The movie follows the Boss (Jeremy Allen White of "The Bear") during a more isolated period in his life when his depression seemed unbeatable. He channeled his haunted feelings into his 1982 album, "Nebraska."

The movie opens in a greyscale scene from Springsteen's childhood. We first see Springsteen in the movie's present as he and the E Street Band are in concert playing "Born to Run," at the tail end of their tour promoting 1980 album "The River." 

You can see members of the band from a distance, such as late saxophonist Clarence Clemons (Judah Sealy), drummer Max Weinberg (Brian Chase), and guitarist Steven Van Zandt (Johnny Cannizzaro) — if you're not a music fan, you may know Little Steven better as Silvio Dante on "The Sopranos."

Then, that's about it for the E Street Band in "Deliver Me From Nowhere." They appear again briefly during the "Nebraska" recording sessions, but none of them speak a word to Bruce. As the film chronicles, Springsteen wrote and recorded "Nebraska" on his own with a multitrack recorder instead of with his band. When he went to record the songs with the E Street Band, he found the rock'n'roll was taking away from the melancholy and rawness that his home recordings of the songs had. So, those home recordings are the ones that were used for the wide release of "Nebraska."

"Nebraska" is a Bruce Springsteen album, but not an E Street Band one. The band is barely in the movie because this isn't an album that Bruce made with them. If the movie was called "Born to Run" or "Darkness on the Edge of Town," that'd be a different story.

The E Street Band is a huge part of the Bruce Springsteen story, but not this chapter of it. "Deliver Me From Nowhere" focuses on Bruce's relationships not with his bandmates, but with his manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) and with his fictional girlfriend Faye Romano (Odessa Young).

In his video "The Broken Formula of Music Biopics," video essayist Patrick Willems argued the best biopics are the ones that zero in on a specific moment. If you don't have to condense someone's life into a couple of hours, then it's less tempting to fall back on shorthand and cliches. "Deliver Me From Nowhere" takes this approach by adapting Warren Zanes's 2023 book of the same title and not, say, Springsteen's 2016 autobiography "Born to Run." ("Nebraska" takes up a short three page chapter of that one.)

"Nebraska" is a pivotal moment in Springsteen's life and career, an album and time filled with powerful emotions. Still, I have my doubts this was the best moment to make into a movie. In his pan of "Deliver Me From Nowhere" over WBUR, critic Sean Burns noted that as compelling of a story as the writing of "Nebraska" is, it's also uncinematic. There are many scenes of Bruce walking or reading alone, with the audience bereft of compelling action to complement or animate his thoughts.

This year, previous Springsteen biographer Peter Ames Carlin (author of 2012's "Bruce") released "Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run," about Springsteen and the E Street Band's pivotal third album. Maybe they should've held off and used that story, where the E Street Band stars, as the basis for the Springsteen biopic.

"Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere" is playing in theaters.