**½/****
starring Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham
based on Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, by Warren Zanes
written and directed by Scott Cooper
by Walter Chaw There are a handful of untouchable albums; Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska is one of them. It’s a record that didn’t make a lick of sense to me until it did, and then, once it did, burrowed in, insinuating and close. It occupies a place in my heart with Tom Waits’s Swordfishtrombones and Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush: chronicles of broken men adrift in cold shoals constructed from their own inadequacy, in love with women who deserve better. If you alternate Nebraska with Suicide‘s self-titled debut (itself an all-timer), they play like a double album, given how deeply the one influenced the other. A couple of tracks on the Boss’s project function as sequels to tracks on Suicide‘s masterpiece; another even sounds like a remake. That’s what Nebraska is: a masterpiece–and a conversation. It’s this dark postcard from the edge where Springsteen teetered for a while. He would have fallen in, I think, if he didn’t have this project tethering him to the earth. Nebraska is a chronicle of depression delivered directly from a battered Gibson J-200 into a four-track TEAC 144 Portastudio cassette recorder in the Colts Neck, New Jersey bedroom of some guy who’s at once the most miserable and most successful he’s ever been.
When you touch needle to vinyl on my copy of Nebraska, the one I’ve had for over forty years now, that has moved with me, attended college with me, and seen the birth of my children and their departure into their own lives, you hear three pops and then the first tortured harmonica tones of the title track. They sound like a train whistle. From a first-person perspective, “Nebraska” tells the story of spree-killer Charles Starkweather, who in 1957 murdered ten people for no discernible reason beyond ennui and the romanticization of the listless and manifest violence of the American mythology. Terrence Malick based his masterpiece, Badlands, on it, and it’s a late-night television viewing of Badlands that inspired Springsteen to investigate Starkweather and write this ode to, not him, exactly, but whatever compulsion drove Starkweather to run into the night with his young girlfriend, Caril Fugate, and murder some people. The first time I watched Badlands was on a midnight broadcast as well. I didn’t know what it was for another decade, but I never forgot it. I held a place for it in me. It speaks to lonesome young men, sad young men, in what Coleridge would call caverns measureless to man. I think a lot about echoes when I think of Nebraska. Not only the physical ones the TEAC 144 imposes on the album–the distortions mild and not-so-mild, the subtle squishing of meter and the feeling it imposes that everything is a dream–but also the archetypal implications of the Echo story and how a nymph’s doomed love for Narcissus is reflected in her inability to express herself except through the last words spoken to her.
In the song, someone asks Charlie why he done what he did, and he says, “Sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” In Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, Bruce Springsteen (played by Jeremy Allen White) writes “WHY?” in big, stupid block letters in his notebook as he looks at microfiche of Starkweather at the local library. This is after he sits up from the couch to watch Badlands in his dark living room in a way no one did when they saw something interesting on television back in the CRT days. More likely, you just kept lying there watching while your mind exploded with fireworks. I’m not saying Deliver Me from Nowhere is very good up to this point, but this is when its “interesting and moody” combination of black-and-white flashbacks to an abusive father and largely wordless journey along the backroads to where he’s from becomes “patronizing” and “painfully overwritten.” I don’t know if whatever the “WHY?” is was a product of a producer’s notes, but I’m going to presume it was because it mirrors (echoes?) the sort of interference Springsteen’s record label tried to impose on Nebraska. Cooper took the notes. Bruce didn’t. That’s the small but enormous difference between a masterpiece and well-intended populist bullshit that is haunting now and again despite itself. Obstructed by the slow-kid exposition is an extraordinary movie that trusts its great cast to convey things in body language rather than monologue–that trusts its audience to be adults who love Nebraska instead of children who prefer Human Touch. Whatever happened to James Gray’s Ad Astra happened to Deliver Me from Nowhere, too. God, what a pity.
“Nebraska” is in love with the mystery of restlessness and the horror of being so disappointed in yourself that you can’t stand to be in the same room with yourself. So in need of love you didn’t earn and approval you don’t deserve. A white kid who resembles James Dean, and the only girl who’ll go for a drive with him is a 15-year-old majorette who lacks empathy, but probably not any more than any other bored kid does. There’s a reason a nation looked into this abyss and saw itself looking right back. What Cooper gets right in his film is the confused shuffling of memories with spats of inspiration, bouncing around like grease on a flattop, some of it burning white hot, some of it hitting the floor in a brown, liquid mess. Sometimes our life leaves scars on us. Sometimes, on anyone standing too close to us. Through a glass door, Cooper gazes upon his Bruce, whose head is down in a familiar adolescent concentration, sounding out the lyrics and writing them down in his childish, careful handwriting. That’s how someone writes “Nebraska.” That’s what someone looks like while they do it. Why didn’t Cooper fight harder against people who didn’t know well enough to leave that alone?
The next track is my favourite on the album. Indeed, it’s one of my favourite songs, period. It’s of a kind with Tom Waits’s “Shore Leave”: quintessential documents of how wounded men are, how pathetic and vulnerable yet also noble, in their own way. How we think of ourselves as failures and don’t understand why the women who forgive us that, well, forgive us that. In “Shore Leave,” Waits’s narrator talks about playing cards with strange men, shooting billiards in strange places, and stealing a few minutes to write a letter back to a waiting wife, telling her how much he loves and misses her, and how far away he’s drifted from home. Chivalry from a boy who’s only acting tough until he can fall into her arms again, like a child might. In Springsteen’s “Atlantic City,” the narrator describes an escalation in mob tensions in the eponymous gambling town and how he has developed a streak of fatalism, realizing he’s accrued debts “no honest man can pay.” He tells his girl to put on her makeup, “fix [her] hair look pretty,” and meet him in Atlantic City, where they can make their escape…right after he does this favour for this guy he’s just met. God, the desperate sadness of it. The doom of it. I cry immediately when I listen to this song; I can’t help it. He’s doing his best, and it’s not nearly enough, and he knows it. Like McCabe in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, he knows he’s going to die trying his best. We are full of things we don’t say. All McCabe can do is tell his girl to put her stockings on because the night’s getting cold, so cold she wouldn’t believe it. There are howls here–or should I say, an album of howls begins here. They’re Martin Rev’s shrieks transplanted, then transmuted, directly from Suicide. It’s the Boss, but he’s not offering an interpretation of Rev’s pain. He’s howling along in sympathy.
The brother of the narrator in Nebraska‘s “Highway Patrolman” is named Frankie. I presume it’s Frankie Teardrop, the subject of an eponymous ten-minute epic that takes up most of Suicide‘s B-side and really should be our National Anthem. Frankie, see, is a 20-year-old factory worker who can’t make enough money to care for his family, thus he kills them, then himself, and spends most of the song burning in Hell. Then there’s Springsteen’s “Johnny 99,” drunk on Tanqueray and wine, who shoots a night clerk and tears off, “wavin’ his gun around and threatenin’ to blow his top.” But he’s arrested and put on trial. He says in his defense, like the protagonist of “Atlantic City,” that he’s “got debts no honest man could pay/The bank was holdin’ my mortgage and takin’ my house away.” Springsteen’s songs from this period are laments for the working class. They’re about perseverance, and on Nebraska, they’re about what happens to ordinary men when the line that ties them to the world frays and lets go.
Cooper’s film captures Springsteen shortly after he finished touring The River. Not quite The Boss yet, he was well on his way to becoming a local legend–the kid who made good. Maybe I’m understating it. He was already filling Wembley Stadium. It’s to Cooper’s credit that Springsteen’s allergy to superstardom (aversion more than allergy, I suppose), comes through in White’s muted, slightly deer-in-the-headlights performance. He acts like Candace Hilligoss in Carnival of Souls: like he’s been swallowed by the grasping deeps of his private pond. His body’s walking around as though he survived the crash, but it doesn’t know what his head knows. This is all of it a lie, and sooner or later, everyone’s gonna figure out he hasn’t taken a clean breath in years. It’s an interesting time to catch Bruce, because I think the success, the not thinking about money for possibly the first time in his life and attention from women and strangers, were disorienting to him on an existential level. I have often wondered who I would be if I could think more kindly of the things I have written, the parts of me I abandon on the page for others to prod. How stunning would the world seem without shame? How jarring would that be for me to reverse the sense of self I have cultivated for my whole life? Would I have the capacity to deal with such a traumatic sea change? Springsteen turned back to his art for stability. He could’ve just as easily swallowed a shotgun.
Folks enjoy dunking on how our confederacy of dunces, our moron plutocracy, likes to blare Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” at their rallies without understanding, or so we like to think, that the song is a black irony about the failure of the American Dream. (The song was written and an early version recorded during the so-called Colts Neck sessions that bore Nebraska as its greatest offspring.) But I think they do get it, insomuch as they believe that anyone with a platform who uses it can fundamentally appreciate how much pain the working class is in. “Born in the U.S.A.” is a rallying cry because part of being a patriot in this country is taking the beatings it doles out on the regular and still loving the idealism of its founding. The moment our Dear Leader said the system was rigged against guys like him, he won the Presidency. The urgency of “State Trooper,” the final cut on side one of Nebraska, is the afterimage left behind by Suicide‘s Link Wray on a rocketship to Heaven, “Ghost Rider.” Both songs are about hitting the road on a wet night in the “wee wee hours/Your mind gets hazy.” Bruce shrieks as percussion here, stripped down, rubbed raw. “Hi-ho, Silver-oh,” he prays to an image of the Old West and American exceptionalism, “deliver me from nowhere.”
Which brings us to the title of Cooper’s film, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere: an obvious equivocation, a clumsy sop to nothing. I once read an apocryphal tale about Julia Roberts taking her role in Mona Lisa Smile because of a single line in the script–something to the effect of, “Even Persephone got six months off from Hell”–only to see that line deleted because producers feared American audiences would be put off by a reference that required wit and basic literacy. The title of Cooper’s film probably started out, à la the Warren Zanes book that inspired it, as Deliver Me from Nowhere, one of the greatest lyrics of all time, then devolved to the point where the idea of compromise was sticking “Springsteen” in front of it so that Joe Lunchbox would know who this movie was about. Before newspapers imploded under the weight of their compromised mediocrity, “Joe Lunchbox” was the imaginary demographic we were instructed to write for. Not too complex; not too egghead with the references, egghead. A fifth-grade reading level, mebbe, if that. It didn’t save newspapers, it just made them pathetic before they died. It didn’t save this film, either. Humiliating. We all deserve better. We deserve better than the fake girlfriend, Faye (Odessa Young, great regardless), who embodies every stereotype of the idealized blue-collar mama Bruce disappoints because he just ain’t no good. Check out the scene where Bruce asks her to name her favourite musicians and she dutifully rattles off Lou Reed and Blondie and Patti Smith and, oh, this guy named Bruce Springsteen. Later, she’ll trainspot a John Lee Hooker cover Bruce plays down at the local dive. Have you seen There’s Something About Mary? Faye is Mary. She asks if Bruce is okay a lot because we’re too stupid to be worried about him without an imaginary conduit. Cut it the fuck out.
We deserve better than forcing an actor as transformational as Jeremy Strong into the Dr. Phil box of emotional character exposition device. As Springsteen’s longtime producer Jon Landau, Strong creases his brow, sets his voice to paternalistic concern, tilts his head in an attitude of care and attention, and does Landau doing his best to support this temperamental genius of his. Feeding into harmful myths about mental illness and abusive artists, it’s simplistic when everything that isn’t spoken in this film is nuanced. Landau is a real person, unlike Faye, though both are fantasy constructs here, manufactured for the adoration of a myth. Check out this conversation Jon has with his wife, Barbara (Grace Gummer, in a truly thankless role):
Jon: It’s not what I was expecting.
Barbara: Well, so, it’s just a demo.
Jon: It’s not just that. It’s like he’s channelling something deeply personal and, quite frankly, dark. His songs. They’re about somebody who feels condemned.
Barbara: It sounds like he’s pushing boundaries you need to acknowledge. And you need him to help you understand what’s driving him so hard.
Jon: The truth is, I don’t know how to help him. I don’t know what to do with this.
Tea in hand, Barbara’s elevens get a hard workout.
Jon: I think I’m not gonna say anything now. I’ll see what the songs become when we cut ’em with a band. That’s always been the way.
This is high-toned garbage of the variety Springsteen at his most suboptimal would nevertheless recognize as such. Walter Hill calls this shit “campfire conversations” and makes it a point of pride not to suffer it in his movies.
Still, there’s good in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, including the way that Cooper shoots the miserable New Jersey winter in shades of amber and ochre, isolating Springsteen on the edge of leaf-infested lakes as his dark, obsessive music illustrates his despair. The way Bruce cries when Jon tells him he doesn’t know how to help him anymore, and how Bruce hugs him desperately, like a drowning man hugs a tree limb–both of them sensing Bruce is going to kill himself and there’s nothing either of them can do to stop it. The scene where he drives down a dark highway listening to Suicide, hating that he lets the people in his life down over and over again, yet convinced he’ll keep doing it for as long as he lives. The flashes of a childhood spent with an alcoholic, absent father (Stephen Graham) who could only express himself with cruelty, the disappointment of his shortcomings displaced onto his frightened, lonesome son (Matthew Pellicano Jr.). The reference, clumsy as it might be, to Night of the Hunter, a film about a young boy so traumatized by his dead father that he even mourns for the inhuman, sleepless monster that replaced him. The scene at the end where Bruce’s dad asks him to sit on his lap, his grown son, because he’s only able to show love when their relationship is ruined and there are no stakes anymore. He’s able to say he’s proud at the moment his son can’t hear it. Depression never gets tired. Depression hunts you relentlessly, always one step ahead of you. Cooper intimately understands male depression. At least, he understands mine. When this movie works, it works so well, although it won’t speak to everyone, and Cooper shouldn’t have tried to force it to. This was never going to be a blockbuster, anyway. Remember, they tried to do that to Nebraska, to make it a multi-platinum chart-topper. There’s an irony that a film about Nebraska‘s creation is effectively the overpolished dog-and-pony show an American Gothic masterpiece would have been had Springsteen brought in the rest of his band, watered down the record’s astonishing imperfections, and sharpened up the hooks until they were cold and ingratiating. I mean, why would you even bother?
