---
title: "Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere"
year: 2025
kind: "film"
canonical: "https://film.one/film/springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere"
fi1m_id: "springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere"
imdb_id: "tt31923069"
tmdb_id: 1230368
wikidata_id: "Q125401070"
fi1m_score: 61
critics_score: 62
critics_reviews: 8
published: "2026-09-09"
updated: "2026-09-18T08:37:48.659949+00:00"
region: "US"
licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL."
---

# Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025)

Directed by Scott Cooper · 2h 00m · MPA PG-13 · Drama, Music

## Identity

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere

- **Canonical:** https://film.one/film/springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere
- **Type:** Film
- **Fi1m ID:** springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere
- **IMDb ID:** tt31923069
- **TMDB ID:** 1230368
- **Wikidata ID:** Q125401070
- **Same entity:** https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31923069/, https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/1230368, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q125401070

**Fi1m score: 61** · Critics 62 from 8 reviews

*In a sentence:* A man makes a sad record in a bedroom and the film keeps knocking to ask if he is all right

> Scott Cooper shrinks the Springsteen story to one year and one cassette recorder, which is the right idea. Jeremy Allen White is quietly good and the recording scenes are the best thing here; the rest is a biopic being careful with a living man.

## Synopsis

Scott Cooper’s film covers a few months in the early 1980s, when Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) comes off the road, rents a house in New Jersey and, with a borrowed four-track cassette recorder set up by his guitar tech Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser), records the songs that become *Nebraska*. His manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) tries to hold off a record company, represented by Al Teller (David Krumholtz), that wants a single and a tour. Between takes the film returns to Springsteen’s childhood and to his father Douglas (Stephen Graham) and mother Adele (Gaby Hoffmann), and follows a new relationship with a local woman, Faye (Odessa Young). Marc Maron plays Chuck Plotkin, the man asked to make a cassette sound like a record.

## Review

Scott Cooper, who wrote and directed, has picked the part of Bruce Springsteen’s story a studio would normally leave out. There are no stadiums and almost no band. In the early 1980s, off the road and alone in a rented house in New Jersey, Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) borrows a four-track cassette recorder, sits on a bed and sings about murderers, laid-off men and his father. The result was [*Nebraska*](https://film.one/film/nebraska), and the film covers the months in which he made it and then refused to let anyone improve it. That is a good idea for a film. Cooper has made about two thirds of it.

White does not do the voice. He plays Springsteen as a man who has gone quiet, shoulders up round his ears, talking to his manager the way a patient talks to a doctor he does not want to worry. He sings the songs himself and he sings them small, which is right, because the record is small. The scene in which he first gets a song onto tape, the machine on the bedspread and the window black behind him, is the best in the film, because nobody speaks and Pamela Martin, editing, lets the take run to the end.

Jeremy Strong plays Jon Landau as a man who has decided his job is to stand between his friend and the world. The scenes between the two of them, in cars and on the phone, are the only relationship in the film that feels lived in. Paul Walter Hauser gives Mike Batlan, the guitar tech who wires up the recorder, an easy warmth the film could have used more of. Marc Maron’s Chuck Plotkin is handed a cassette and told to turn it into a record, and the sequences in which the full band tries the songs and flattens them make the film’s point better than any line does.

Masanobu Takayanagi shoots the childhood in black and white and the present in browns and ambers, rooms lit by one lamp. Stefania Cella furnishes the rented house with almost nothing, a mattress, a chair, the recorder, so the empty space around White does some of the acting. Kasia Walicka Maimone keeps him in the same denim and flannel and puts Landau in blazers bought to meet lawyers. Jeremiah Fraites keeps his score to a few guitar figures and mostly stays out of the songs’ way; when it comes in under the father scenes it tells us what to feel a beat before we would have felt it anyway.

The trouble is everything Cooper adds to the record. Odessa Young’s Faye is an invention, and her scenes exist to show us he is kind; we believed it the first time. The depression is handled with a doctor’s office and lines that say exactly what the character is feeling, in a film whose subject wrote ten songs because he could not say it. And Cooper goes back to the childhood too often. Every cut to the boy stops the man, and by the fourth or fifth we were restless, watching the film assemble a case for its hero rather than watching him work.

Then one late scene between Stephen Graham and White, which we will not describe, caught us off guard. We had sat through the doctor’s office with our arms folded, and then Graham, who barely speaks in it, did something with his hands and his breathing, and we were moved, more than we thought this film had in it. He does it in about six minutes.

Cooper made *Crazy Heart* (2009), about a country singer it allowed to be a drunk and a bore before it allowed him to be good. This one has a living subject and it shows. Springsteen is permitted only the flaws the songs already admit to.

If you own the record, this is worth an evening, and the recording scenes will send you back to it. If you do not, it will explain the songs to you and then, gently, get in their way. It runs 120 minutes and carries a 12A, and the loudest thing in it is a cassette.

*Fi1m score 61, published 9 September 2026.*

## What the critics say

The reviews are mixed, and the spread is fairly wide. Almost every critic praises Jeremy Allen White, describing a raw, internalised performance that gets at Springsteen’s depression rather than his stage persona, and several single out his singing. The decision to confine the film to the making of Nebraska is also broadly welcomed as a relief from the career-spanning biopic, with the father-son scenes and the bond between Springsteen and his manager named as the most convincing material.

The reservations cluster around drama: many find the film short on narrative drive, tension and context, stronger on atmosphere than incident, and several say it falls back on familiar music-film beats and occasionally weak dialogue. The Guardian objects to an invented romantic subplot it finds derivative, and The Ringer is the sharpest dissenter, calling the film timid and artificial while still crediting White. Even the warmest notices concede an uneven opening and a sag in the later depressive stretch.

## Straight answers

**Is Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere worth watching?**

*Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere* is worth an evening if you own *Nebraska*, and we scored it 61. The recording scenes, with Jeremy Allen White alone with a cassette machine on a bed, are the best thing in it. Everything Scott Cooper adds around them, the childhood flashbacks and a doctor's office, is a biopic being careful with a living man.

**How long is Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, and what is it rated?**

*Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere* runs 2h 00m and is rated PG-13 by the MPA in the US. It is a drama and music film.

**Where can I watch Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere in the US?**

*Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere* is streaming on Disney+ in the US, and it is also available to rent from Amazon Prime Video from $3.99. Availability is checked daily; the links above go straight to each service.

**How violent or frightening is Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, and is it suitable for children?**

*Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere* carries a 12A and is not violent or frightening; the loudest thing in it is a cassette recorder. It deals with depression and a hard childhood in scenes that state their feelings plainly, so it is suitable for older children and teenagers, though its slow, quiet subject may bore younger viewers.

**How does Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere compare to Badlands?**

*Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere* is a careful biopic about the making of *Nebraska*, while [*Badlands*](https://film.one/film/badlands) is the Terrence Malick crime romance that gave the album its title song. Malick's film is the better of the two, funnier, more frightening and clearer about its people. Watch Cooper's film for the recording scenes, then Malick's to see where the songs came from.

**What should I watch after Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere?**

After *Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere*, try [*Badlands*](https://film.one/film/badlands) (1973, Fi1m 91): Malick’s killers on the plains; the film that gave the album its title song. Then [*Control*](https://film.one/film/control) (2007, Fi1m 80): Ian Curtis in black and white, and a film that never explains him; and [*Inside Llewyn Davis*](https://film.one/film/inside-llewyn-davis) (2013, Fi1m 87): A folk singer who is good and gets nowhere; the Coens at their coldest.

### Reviews we read (15)

- **Empire**, Jordan King (80/100, inferred): The film starts unevenly but comes alive when focusing on the creation of Nebraska, delivering a strong central performance from Jeremy Allen White that captures Springsteen's vulnerability and trauma. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere/)
- **The Hollywood Reporter**, David Rooney (70/100, inferred): The critic praises the nuanced, intimate portrait of Springsteen as a depressed young man, highlighting Jeremy Allen White's raw, internalized performance and the film's focus on the making of the Nebraska album amid personal struggles. They single out the moving exploration of the father-son relationship and the integrity in portraying the artist as a fragile human being. [Read](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere-review-jeremy-allen-white-1236352092/)
- **Vulture** (70/100, inferred): The critic appreciates the film's depiction of two sides of Springsteen – the troubled artist and the explosive performer – and Jeremy Allen White's performance, praising the exploration of creativity, depression, and the creative process as worth seeing despite some conventional biopic elements. [Read](https://www.vulture.com/article/springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere-offers-2-sides-of-bruce.html)
- **Evening Standard**, Lisa Wright (50/100, inferred): The biopic has engaging musical sequences and strong supporting turns but often avoids deep emotional exploration, swerving the gritty realities of its subject. [Read](https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/film/springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere-review-b1253317.html)
- **The i Paper**, Francesca Steele (50/100, inferred): A largely mediocre biopic that hits expected beats with Jeremy Allen White's solid but unremarkable performance, though it shines in quieter family scenes and reflections on inspiration. [Read](https://inews.co.uk/culture/film/deliver-me-from-nowhere-springsteen-mediocre-3990303)
- **Los Angeles Times**, Katie Walsh: The film offers a thoughtful character study of Springsteen during the creation of Nebraska, emphasizing the creative process and the support of figures like Jon Landau. It excels in exploring artistic isolation but loses focus in later depressive sections and feels only partially successful overall. [Read](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2025-10-23/springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere-review-jeremy-allen-white-strong-nebraska)
- **Radio Times**, Terry Staunton (★★★☆☆): The review notes occasional weak dialogue but commends the intimate focus on Springsteen's personal struggles and the creation of Nebraska, especially the believable bond between the star and his manager. [Read](https://www.radiotimes.com/app/springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere-review-is-the-boss-biopic-worth-a-cinema-trip/)
- **The Guardian**: The film is an awkward biopic stranded between rock mythology and pop-psych melodrama that only partly escapes music-movie clichés. It focuses on the making of the Nebraska album but includes invented elements like a romantic subplot that underscore the subject's caring masculinity in a derivative way. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/oct/23/springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere-review-brooding-earnest-portrait-of-the-boss-crisis-years)
- **The Telegraph**: This low-key biopic resists fireworks but showcases Jeremy Allen White burrowing into Bruce Springsteen’s tortured psyche with sombre authority. It centers on the intimate recording of the Nebraska album and features committed vocal performances from the star. [Read](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere-jeremy-allen-white/)
- **Time Out**, Leonie Cooper (3 out of 5 stars): The critic praises the vivid portrayal of blue-collar Americana and Jeremy Allen White's committed performance but finds the film bigger on atmosphere and vibes than narrative drive or jeopardy. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere-review-2025)
- **Variety**, Peter Debruge: The film focuses on Springsteen's dark, introspective period making the album Nebraska rather than a standard career-spanning biopic. Jeremy Allen White is praised for embodying the role and performing the songs, but the story lacks sufficient context and dramatic tension to fully engage. [Read](https://variety.com/2025/film/reviews/springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere-review-1236501785/)
- **NME** (4/5): The film is an intimate, unvarnished anti-biopic focused on Springsteen’s personal struggles and the creation of the Nebraska album rather than his triumphs. It singles out Jeremy Allen White’s soulful, tortured performance and the film’s honest portrayal of artistic integrity over commercial success. [Read](https://www.nme.com/reviews/film-reviews/springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere-review-bruce-jeremy-allen-white-3899392)
- **/Film**, Chris Evangelista (6/10): The critic finds the film formulaic overall with occasional conventional elements but singles out Jeremy Allen White's performance as Springsteen as exceptional, haunted, and the main reason to see it. [Read](https://www.slashfilm.com/2003257/springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere-review/)
- **The Ringer**, Adam Nayman (35/100, inferred): The critic finds the film offers only lavish and ingratiating clichés and an artificial presentation despite its authentic source material. They single out Jeremy Allen White’s credible performance for praise but criticize the film's timid approach to depicting Bruce as flawed. [Read](https://www.theringer.com/2025/10/23/movies/springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere-review-biopic)
- **Paste**, Jesse Hassenger (5.9): The film focuses on a compelling sliver of Springsteen's life but doesn't drill deeply enough, resulting in vague emotional arcs and skeletal character development compared to the songs. It praises the capable impersonation by Jeremy Allen White but notes the relationship and family scenes feel like filler. [Read](https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/scott-cooper/springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere-nyff-review-jeremy-allen-white)

## Details

- **Director:** Scott Cooper
- **Director:** Scott Cooper
- **Screenplay:** Scott Cooper
- **Cinematography:** Masanobu Takayanagi
- **Editor:** Pamela Martin
- **Music:** Jeremiah Fraites
- **Production design:** Stefania Cella
- **Costume design:** Kasia Walicka Maimone
- **Producer:** Scott Stuber, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Eric Robinson
- **Cast:** Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen; Jeremy Strong as Jon Landau; Paul Walter Hauser as Mike Batlan; Stephen Graham as Douglas Springsteen; Odessa Young as Faye Romano; Gaby Hoffmann as Adele Springsteen; Marc Maron as Chuck Plotkin; David Krumholtz as Al Teller
- **Runtime:** 2h 00m
- **Certificate (MPA):** PG-13
- **Release (the US):** 24 October 2025
- **Genres:** Drama, Music
- **Budget:** $55 million
- **Box office:** $45 million
- **Trailer:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH9NgXGVgK4

## Where to watch in the US

- Disney+: add-on, uhd
- Amazon Prime Video: rent $3.99, uhd
- Amazon Prime Video: buy $4.99, uhd

*Checked 2026-09-10.*

Also available in: AR, AT, AU, BE, BG, BR, CA, CH, CL, CO, CZ, DE, DK, EC, EE, ES, FI, FR, GB, GR, HK, HR, HU, IE, IS, IT, JP, KR, LT, MX, NL, NO, NZ, PA, PE, PL, PT, RO, RS, SE, SG, SI, TR, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country.

## If you liked this

- *Badlands* (1973), Fi1m 91: Malick’s killers on the plains; the film that gave the album its title song. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/badlands.md)
- *Control* (2007), Fi1m 80: Ian Curtis in black and white, and a film that never explains him. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/control.md)
- *Love & Mercy* (2014): Brian Wilson in the studio and in the dark; two actors, one man.
- *Inside Llewyn Davis* (2013), Fi1m 87: A folk singer who is good and gets nowhere; the Coens at their coldest. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/inside-llewyn-davis.md)
- *Crazy Heart* (2009), Fi1m 71: Cooper’s first, with a singer it lets be unlikeable before it lets him mend. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/crazy-heart.md)

---
© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere