The upcoming Bruce Springsteen biopic, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, focuses on the making of the rocker’s 1982 album Nebraska, but some may be wondering why it isn’t a full-blown biopic on The Boss.
The movie is based on Warren Zanes’ book Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. The film’s director, Scott Cooper, tells Entertainment Weekly that he liked the “intimacy” of the source material.
“It wasn’t about Bruce Springsteen, the icon and stadium-filling rock star,” Cooper tells the mag. “It was about Bruce alone in a rented house, trying to understand himself and his unresolved trauma through song.”
He adds that the book “captured the tension between the myth of Bruce Springsteen and the man.”
“That’s where the film lived for me,” he says. “Not in the spectacle, but in the silence, the hesitation, the uncertainty. I saw a cinematic portrait of an artist who was willing to strip himself bare.”
Cooper says the film “isn’t a typical musical biopic,” noting he didn’t want to tell Bruce’s entire story.
“It’s about honoring this particular moment — the stillness, the searching, and the emotional honesty,” he tells EW.
Cooper also had a personal reason for wanting to make a film about Nebraska.
“Nebraska was my entry into Bruce Springsteen. I was immediately struck by its minimalist quality, its power,” he says. “It seemed to come from some of the same world that I was accustomed to. You could tell that these were songs that meant something to somebody.”
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, starring Jeremy Allen White as Bruce and Jeremy Strong as his manager Jon Landau, opens in theaters Oct. 24.
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