Bruce Springsteen is sad.
My mistake; Bruce Springsteen was sad. Or to be specific, Bruce Springsteen was sad during the making of his 1982 album, Nebraska. And if we’re to believe the heavy-handed final title cards, he’s still sad today. But it’s a different flavour of sad — a sad managed by therapists, indefatigably supportive friends and a quiet acceptance of his sort-of-abusive, mostly-meant-well father.
This is the focus of Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, a microcosm of an artist’s career helpfully scored by subsequent hits like I’m on Fire and Born in the U.S.A. Attempting less to outline a grand, arcing trajectory, it is a mostly self-contained effort; meticulously cataloguing the writing and recording of that record, and how it changed Springsteen's outlook.
If that nearly flat character arc seems like a shallow hook to hang an entire movie’s hat on, well, how dare you? If you weren’t aware, this is the biopic business: a titanic book and movie industry that operates around two fundamental axioms.
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