Fact vs. Fiction in 'Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere' Actorsvaultpro

Biopics about musicians have proven to be successful again and again, with films like Bohemian Rhapsody and Walk the Line. In pursuit of this success, some biopics blur fact and fiction to create more drama while still offering a general account of an artist’s life. That’s not so much the case for Scott Cooper’s biopic about Bruce Springsteen, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, which stars Jeremy Allen White as the famous singer.

Deliver Me From Nowhere is not about Bruce Springsteen’s beginnings or success. Instead, it focuses on a specific, personal time in his life. After releasing Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and The River, Springsteen made a bold move with his album Nebraska. The album was dark and played softer, without Springsteen backed by the iconic E Street Band. Deliver Me From Nowhere, based on Warren Zanes’ book of the same name, shows how Springsteen wrestled with his past with his father while writing Nebraska alone in a rental home.

‘Deliver Me From Nowhere’ Gets the Music Right

20th Century Studios

Deliver Me From Nowhere carefully captured many details of Nebraska‘s recording. After his The River tour ended in 1981, Springsteen rented a home in Colts Neck, New Jersey, where he began working on songs. A scene in the film shows Springsteen talking to his manager, Jon Landau (played by Jeremy Strong), who tells the singer that production costs should be kept lower for the next album, as The River used up nearly all of its budget. Springsteen really did struggle to keep his production costs low, especially with Born to Run, which took 14 months to finish. This is all mentioned in the film as the setup for the primary tension on the music side, which focuses on Springsteen’s unconventional recording method for Nebraska.

Springsteen purchased a cassette recorder for his home so he could start playing his songs before taking them to the studio for a band-backed track. Many characters in the film, including audio engineer Mike Batlan (played by Paul Walter Hauser), mention that the song will need to be recorded in the studio later, setting up the twist that Nebraska would use the songs recorded on the cassettes. He did try to record the songs with the band, as seen in the film, but they just didn’t sound right to him.

These recordings at Colts Neck show many of the specific details behind Nebraska. In the film, Springsteen is shown getting his real inspiration for his title song when he sees the Terrence Malick movie Badlands (not to be confused with Springsteen’s earlier song “Badlands”) on television and starts writing about the murderer Charles Starkweather. The film depicts Springsteen getting ideas during this time for songs that would appear on Born in the U.S.A., including the album’s title track, “I’m on Fire,” and “Glory Days.” Deliver Me From Nowhere also uses details about the actual production process, like the fact that Springsteen played the glockenspiel — which had become a signature instrument on some of his most famous songs — and that he used a waterlogged boombox for the final mix.

Deliver Me From Nowhere also has some great references to real-life events that happened during this time. Whenever the Colts Neck cassette is shown, it’s never in a case, which is a true detail about the demo cassette. In one of their talks, Landau gives Springsteen a script for a Paul Schrader film called Born in the U.S.A., which is supposed to star Bruce Springsteen. That script inspired Springsteen’s song of the same name, while the film eventually became Light of Day, starring Joan Jett and Michael J. Fox. In Deliver Me From Nowhere, Landau also mentions that it was smart that Springsteen kept “Cover Me” from going to Donna Summer. Springsteen originally wrote the song for Summer, after he had already let other artists take his hits, like Manfred Man did with “Blinded by the Light.”

Faye Romano Never Existed

Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen and Odessa Young as Faye Romano in Deliver Me From Nowhere

Although Deliver Me From Nowhere is mostly accurate, it makes one big change. Springsteen did indeed frequent The Stone Pony, but he never met Faye Romano there. The love interest, played by Odessa Young, never existed in real life. Springsteen was engaged in a few different casual relationships during the making of Nebraska. Young drew on accounts of these relationships from books like Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town. She also told Stylist, “It wasn’t expected of me to model this person on something real, so I had a lot of creative freedom with Faye.”

She’s one of the few non-musical, non-family characters in the film, alongside Matt Delia, who is based on Springsteen’s childhood friend. Still, her presence in the film is important. She allows Springsteen to have a love interest in the movie while protecting the privacy of the real people he dated at the time. She also drives Springsteen’s inner emotions as he reflects on his relationship with his father.

Bruce Springsteen’s Relationship With Family, Explained

Stephen Graham as Douglas Springsteen and Matthew Anthony Pellicano Jr. as young Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere

Family plays a large role in Deliver Me From Nowhere, with black-and-white scenes showing memories from Bruce Springsteen’s childhood. Most of these scenes feature Bruce Springsteen and his father, Douglas Springsteen, played brilliantly by Stephen Graham. Many of the scenes with these two characters feel like they were ripped straight from the pages of Bruce Springsteen’s memoir, Born to Run. In one scene, a young Bruce Springsteen hears his parents fighting and takes a baseball bat down the stairs. The child swings the bat at his father, who laughs at being hit, mirroring a story from Springsteen’s memoir.

His father’s mental health worsened in later years, and Douglas Springsteen was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. His father’s health impacted Bruce Springsteen’s own mental health, and he had a breakdown in Texas at the same time he was working on Nebraska, as seen in the film. In the memoir, Springsteen also writes about flying to California to find his father, who had wandered off. Springsteen found him in a bar in Chinatown, and they went to McDonald’s afterward to get Egg McMuffins. The movie shows all that, while leaving out minor details, like the fact that Douglas Springsteen got in a fight at that McDonald’s.

The scenes in Deliver Me From Nowhere aim to explore Springsteen’s complicated relationship with his father without passing judgment on him. For example, the scene where Douglas takes Bruce to see The Night of the Hunter — a film Bruce Springsteen would reference in his 1987 song “Cautious Man” — is a nice father-son moment, but the images of the film also show how Bruce feared his father. This tension between whether Douglas Springsteen was a gentle or harmful father is important, as it’s been referenced many times throughout Bruce Springsteen’s career, like in his live performance of “The River” at the LA Coliseum in September 1985. Deliver Me From Nowhere is now playing in theaters.