Finally saw
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere and a slight hunch paid off when Springsteen appeared as a surprise guest - the highlight of the evening.
I don't know any other cinephiles (or rather other, younger cinephiles who aren't part of Springsteen's generation) who love his work, and it's not really a surprise until I recall how much his work is tied up with American cinema from the studio era to the New Hollywood. This is a guy whose ad-libs during his stage act inspired DeNiro's most famous improvisation in
Taxi Driver, and in turn Paul Schrader approached him about a film project that sure enough inspired the title song of his best-known album. Springsteen also famously drew inspiration from Hollywood cinema from John Ford to
The Night of the Hunter to Terrence Malick's
Badlands when it came to writing his most enduring songs. (At one point, when Springsteen and Landau were looking for album titles, they tried picking them from Andrew Sarris's
The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968, and Landau picked a perfect one in Borzage's
History Is Made at Night - there's at least a dozen great outtakes from the
Born in the USA sessions alone that would've added up to a great and fitting album for that title.) When he began making promotional films and then music videos in the 1980s, he even enlisted established film auteurs like John Sayles, Schrader and Brian DePalma, still a rarity then.
Anyway, despite the criticisms I've heard elsewhere, I gave this a try, and while the production itself hits its marks, I think the basic script was too flawed for this to ever work - too many elements appear to be at odds with each other, and I was left with the impression that the ideas are never effectively dramatized. Pains me to say this because the film - especially the album involved - obviously meant a
lot to everyone involved given the comments made during the post-screening discussion.
The most astute observation I've heard came from a few critics like Greil Marcus:
Greil Marcus wrote:...I found myself irritated and dumbfounded that out of all the fulsome discussion of the film, except for a line at the end of the always incisive Richard Brody’s review in The New Yorker, and, yesterday, Carl Wilson at the end of his Slate review, it was being taken as solely a picture about a personal crisis, when at the time, in 1982, the Nebraska album seemed so plainly a matter of a person addressing himself to a social and political crisis, and trying to paint a picture of a nation whose cords were fraying, or being ripped up and out as a social and political project...
Even Springsteen himself affirmed this in his handwritten liner notes to his 1995
Greatest Hits compilation, so it's startling to see that political context virtually absent in the world of 1982. Marcus does claim that a glimpse of it comes back when we see them record "Born in the U.S.A." in the studio, specifically for one lyric, but I can't really agree with that - that whole scene is driven by a sense of joyousness, in the band as they play it and in the observers in the control booth, realizing they're witnessing something great...which they later only discuss in terms of a "hit" record. I never got the sense that the film was letting the song speak for itself, if anything it was glossing over what the song was about and framed it only as Springsteen's key to massive commercial success. The hardship and even the war that inspired it are never seen, mentioned or heard - though Springsteen clearly gets the title lyric from Schrader's script, the title page is the ONLY information we get from that proposed film.
But even the personal focus has its own problems. When it comes to the struggle of realizing
Nebraska, the film never finds a way to show that powerfully in cinematic fashion - too much is explained rather than shown, and it didn't have to be that way. There are moments where I wondered why they didn't juxtapose the results laid down in the studio against the demo tape instead of relying on Springsteen complaining that it's not coming together. It's as if they don't believe in the music enough to simply show how it sounds right where the new recordings do not. (And again, everyone involved in the film clearly believed in the music, which makes it all the more frustrating.)
A similar issue plagues the film's depiction of Springsteen's growing struggles with depression, and as a result, I didn't feel a genuine build to the climax. For example, we understand Springsteen is going through a tough time, but beyond the flashbacks, the depths of that struggle isn't fully depicted - once again, a lot of it is simply explained. For example, when his girlfriend tells him she sees how he's scared of hurting them, it struck me how that impression is never made in the film whenever we see these characters together - maybe we're supposed to infer it from the previous flashbacks to his painful childhood, but it's a huge assumption to make without seeing anything that concrete in their relationship aside from her complaining that he hasn't called.
Paradoxically, the story actually has elements worth explaining - the visits to his abandoned childhood home did happen and dramatically it comes across as an effective idea, but Springsteen never understood why he was compelled to do this until he sought an explanation in therapy. In the way he tells it in some of his best onstage monologues, he had to push his therapist for an answer because he wasn't going to come up with one himself, and hearing it laid out for him is powerful. It's a case where something spoken doesn't feel like it's expository because it's played against something the speaker is experiencing rather than taking the place of the experience itself.
Springsteen has famously discussed his struggles throughout his career, and it was only in recent years that he's gone into great detail about going into therapy. The impression he leaves is someone who's finally overwhelmed by crippling depression after the illusion of being a pillar of strength ultimately crumbles - when he makes that very first visit, it's essentially a dam breaking where he finally allows a lifetime of pain and trauma to flow uncontained. I can see how that's supposed to come across in the film, but in terms of impact, I thought it fell short.
