A crisis point comes during a cross-country road trip, during which Bruce’s driver, Matt (Harrison Sloan Gilbertson), has to help a distressed Bruce stay on his feet at a county fair. But that scene, too, is brisk, generic, and facile; it doesn’t so much depict a breakdown as signify one. The flashbacks to Bruce’s childhood show that his volatile father also suffered from the condition, and those scenes are inescapably, if unsurprisingly, moving, even if Cooper resorts to the cliché of presenting them in black-and-white, generalizing them, as if a nineteen-fifties childhood were like the TVs of the time. The best part isn’t the flashbacks’ content but their setup: Bruce repeatedly drives up to the house where he grew up, which now appears abandoned, and stares at it as if to summon memories. In Warren Zanes’s 2023 book, “Deliver Me from Nowhere,” on which the movie is based, Springsteen is quoted as taking those drives and, he continued, “listening for the voices of my father, my mother, me as a child.” That’s a far more evocative and haunting description than any of the depictions in the movie.
As for the core of the story, the making and release of “Nebraska,” “Springsteen” is both intrinsically absorbing in its contours and rushed and smudged in its details. Scene after scene exists not to observe action attentively or to reveal aspects of character but to drop pieces of information that add up to a plot: Jon encountering an executive who expects Bruce’s next album to be a big hit; Bruce idly plucking his guitar and tapping the cover of a book of O’Connor’s stories. Cooper gives far more attention to the delivery of the multitrack tape deck by an associate named Mikey (Paul Walter Hauser) than to Bruce’s efforts to record his songs with it. There’s very little of Bruce singing at home—only enough for evidentiary purposes, and not filmed with any sense of fascination or wonder. There is no sense of what Bruce is actually looking for while he’s performing, how he worked out each song, how he added the additional instrumentation (all of which he himself performed) in his instant home studio. He asks Mikey to help him record, but their work together in that crucial process is left out.
The elisions, the lack of curiosity in dispensing the story, are of more than merely factual import; they shrink the movie’s emotional spectrum—including its performances. White’s performance is committed and fluent; as impersonation, it’s neither astounding nor distractingly eerie but, rather, thoughtful and earnest. Compared with Timothée Chalamet’s channelling of Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown,” White’s portrayal of Springsteen is unshowy—an interpretation that befits the character of the much less theatrical Springsteen. But White as Bruce is also far less expressive than Chalamet as Bob, not because he’s an inherently less expressive actor but because Cooper’s writing and direction don’t give him any sufficiently extensive scenes in which to develop the character.
Bruce not only demands the release of the cassette tape’s unsweetened recordings but offers stringent conditions for the album’s release (no singles, no tour, no press), and it’s Jon’s job to convey the message to record-company executives. The two men’s bond of loyalty and understanding provides the emotional center of the movie, but their connection goes largely unexamined. Jon exhorts Bruce to simply go ahead and make music. “Find something real,” Jon says—he will “deal with the noise.” Jon is a former music journalist and critic, and in a scene at home with his wife (Grace Gummer) he offers the movie’s few lines of external perspective on “Nebraska.” Bruce is “channelling something deeply personal and dark,” Jon says, and later adds that Bruce feels guilty about stardom and leaving the people from his home town. The movie never goes further in considering the substance of the album in question; these brief lines of dialogue sum up Cooper’s view of what the album has to say.
What Cooper avoids is that “Nebraska” is, among other things, a political album. Its songs are filled with workingmen getting a raw deal—losing a job, losing a mortgaged house to a bank, owing money, accepting work for a gangster, bearing the burden of a boss’s disfavor, being broke and turning to crime, trying to live with the trauma of military service in the Vietnam War. The album doesn’t only tell a story of loss of faith in the American dream; it provides a retrospective debunking of the idea that that so-called dream was ever anything more. In “Springsteen,” Bruce says that he likes how the demo tape sounds “from the past or something.” Far from looking back nostalgically to the nineteen-fifties, though, “Nebraska” suggests that, in the lives of working Americans, there had always been violence and trauma lurking beneath placidly repressed surfaces—and that the pressures and burdens that he and the country were enduring at the moment come from out of the past. Cooper’s movie certainly doesn’t make Bruce’s childhood look happy, but in limiting Bruce’s retrospective gloom to the personal realm, it ignores the singer-songwriter’s wider social vision. The movie doesn’t have the courage of the real-life Springsteen’s convictions. ♦
