Men’s mental health in the time of four-track recording.
There’s a lot of beauty in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. Jeremy Allen White‘s sensual portrayal of Bruce Springsteen. The rich blacks in Masanobu Takayamagi‘s cinematography. The pacing and production design which not only evokes the period, but feels like it was actually filmed in 1982.
Director Scott Cooper and co-writer Warren Zanes shrewdly choose to focus on a specific timespan their subject’s career, rather than merely catalogue events over the course of his life, as rock biopics are wont more often than not to do. In this instance, that period the recording of Springsteen’s 1982 Nebraska album. There are flashbacks to Springsteen’s childhood abuse, which illuminate his present state of mind, and the slow journey to what is in this film, and must have been at the time, a remarkable acknowledgement of mental health and the need for professional help.
Much like the album whose creation it chronicles, this film captures a moment and a state of mind – little context, no further explanation, none needed.
While Jeremy Strong‘s performance as Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau is lovely, his scenes with wife Barbara (Grace Gummer) are written less like dialogue and more like music biography or box set liner notes – such unnatural exposition of Springsteen’s mental health, emotional state, artistic process, and art-vs-commerce struggle… the film’s prosaic Greek chorus, basically spelling out everything the movie is already very obviously about.
I write this as someone who isn’t a fan of The Boss, and has never listened to Nebraska (I’m only listening to it now, for the first time, as I write this). I am, however, someone of the generation that grew up with cassette tapes. In this day and age, the idea of recording alone at home is far from revolutionary – if anything, the artist toiling in isolation is, perhaps ironically, better supported by technology and tutorials which have only become increasingly more accessible in the decades since Springsteen cobbled together his bedroom studio. But if you have ever recorded on a four-track cassette machine, and perhaps even if you haven’t, then you can understand exactly how someone can pour such uniquely intimate creativity into it, and become so attached to what they hear back that no amount of money spent on ‘proper’ recording in a professional studio could ever recapture or recreate.
Further Viewing
Bruce Springsteen was closely involved in the film’s production – and, much to Jeremy Allen White’s surprise, was present on set from day one, watching the actor play him (via 20th Century Studios):