Scott Cooper's Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is a musical biopic focusing on the genesis of the album Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen's acoustic masterpiece. In the role of the musician, Jeremy Allen White (The Bear, Shameless) delivers a powerful performance, surrounded by Jeremy Strong, Stephen Graham, Paul Walter Hauser, Odessa Young, and Gaby Hoffman. The film will be released in theaters on October 22, 2025.
The director, known for Crazy Heart and The Blind Side, adopts an intimate tone to evoke this pivotal period in the American singer's life. The script explores the tension between success and artistic sincerity, as Springsteen records one of his most memorable albums alone on a four-track tape recorder.
Check out the first images in the official trailer:
The trailer reveals a sober and introspective atmosphere, faithful to the spirit of Nebraska, with a restrained Jeremy Allen White.
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
Film | 2025 | 2h10
In theaters October 22, 2025
Original title: Deliver Me From Nowhere
Nationality: United States
Inspired by real events, this biographical drama looks back at the making of the album Nebraska, recorded in 1982 in Springsteen's bedroom. This raw acoustic record, populated by wandering souls, marks a turning point in the singer's career and illustrates his need for authenticity.
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is aimed at fans of rock music and musical biopics such as Walk the Line and Ray. Its pared-down direction favors introspection over performance, in line with other intimate musical dramas. Shot in New Jersey and New York, the film faithfully recreates the places that shaped Springsteen's life.
In this work carried by Jeremy Allen White, Scott Cooper's camera captures the loneliness, the search for meaning, and the inner tension of an artist facing his legacy. The supporting roles, played by Jeremy Strong, Stephen Graham, Paul Walter Hauser, and Gaby Hoffman, reinforce the emotional anchor and psychological density of the story.
Directed by Scott Cooper, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere follows in the tradition of musical biopics while resolutely breaking away from it. The film focuses on a limited but crucial period in the life of Bruce Springsteen: the creation of Nebraska in 1982, a stripped-down, introspective album recorded on a simple four-track. Jeremy Allen White plays the singer, delivering a performance of restrained intensity, surrounded by Jeremy Strong as Jon Landau, his manager and confidant, and Stephen Graham as his broken father, a shadow figure haunting every note and every silence.
The story begins in Freehold, New Jersey, in black and white, where a young Bruce accompanies his mother to bring his alcoholic father home from a bar. This opening sets the tone: that of a film about memory, parentage, and the search for identity rather than fame. The narrative alternates between childhood and the period when Nebraska was created, revealing an artist in crisis, torn between the pressure of success and his need for artistic truth. Springsteen rejects industry conventions—no singles, no tours, no press—and chooses sobriety as a form of integrity.
Scott Cooper approaches this material with a refined mise-en-scène. The wide shots anchor Springsteen in his modest surroundings: working-class houses, gray roads, garages transformed into studios. The close-ups reveal the inner tension, the gaze of a man who no longer recognizes himself in his own reflection. The camera, often static or barely moving, favors observation over demonstration. The visual palette, oscillating between black and white and sepia tones, reflects the struggle between past and present, memory and creation. The omnipresent silence becomes a dramatic instrument: "the quiet can get a little loud," says one line. The music, for its part, never seeks to illustrate; it whispers, it haunts, it recalls what Springsteen is trying to both escape and rediscover.
Jeremy Allen White delivers a remarkable performance: he doesn't copy Springsteen, he embodies him in his vulnerability, his hesitations, his silences. His performance is stripped down: he plays as much with the absence of words as with bursts of emotion. Jeremy Strong, as Landau, offers a stable, almost therapeutic presence, while Stephen Graham, intense, makes Dutch Springsteen a spectral figure of working-class and paternal trauma. This performance echoes his moving role in the Netflix series Teenage, where he already accurately explored the complexity of the paternal bond. Together, they give the film a human dimension, stripped of all grandiloquence.
Thematically, the film explores the struggle between commercial success and artistic authenticity, a return to working-class roots, mental health, and the father-son relationship. It is less a film about a musician than a reflection on creativity as therapy. As in Don't Look Back, a biopic about Bob Dylan, Cooper chooses temporal precision over epic scope. But where Dylan faded into the background behind the myth, Springsteen here confronts his own humanity.
Some viewers, however, may see this as calculated coldness. The deliberately slow pace leaves little room for the rock fervor one might expect from such a subject. The film favors silent tension over concert scenes, pain over performance. This restraint, admirable to some, will frustrate those who were expecting a more traditional biopic, punctuated with moments of triumph. Critics have referred to "stagnant frames" or a mise-en-scène that is sometimes too measured for the inner fire it attempts to describe.
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is therefore not a spectacle, but an intimate portrait of an artist searching for meaning behind the glory. For viewers who appreciate introspective work, nuance, and slowness, it offers a dense and sincere experience. For others, it may seem too discreet, almost stifled by its own modesty.
A biopic that goes against the grain: slow, serious, deeply human, carried by Jeremy Allen White at the top of his game.
To go further, check out our selection of new movies for October 2025, this week's releases, and our guide to biopics currently in theaters.
This page may contain AI-assisted elements, more information here.
