Bruce Springsteen Understands Depression. His Biopic Doesn't

Here’s a story that never grows tired of the telling: Bruce Springsteen, on the cusp of greatness following a string of instant classic albums that turned a scrawny New Jersey hippie into a bona fide rock star, pivoted to a spare, gothic folk album. Nebraska mystified and frustrated executives, who couldn’t understand why the Boss would zag into such commercially unviable territory with a fuzzy, warbly collection of bedroom demos about losers and outlaws on the fringes of society, but it made sense to Springsteen. To hear him tell the tale, it was the only thing his personal demons would allow him to release at the time, and he didn’t feel comfortable releasing Born in the U.S.A.— the album that would solidify his legacy—until he’d exorcised Nebraska. 

Writer and director Scott Cooper brings this story to the screen in thew new film Springteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, working off Warren Zanes’ book about Nebraska. Jeremy Allen White is tasked with playing Springsteen, and he does a nice job of it. In a scene near the end, White’s Springsteen finally sits down with a therapist and tries to open up, but only sobs can come out. It’s powerful. White long ago mastered portraying this sort of incoherent anguish on The Bear, and he’s extremely effective as a man struggling with emotions he can’t articulate. It’s too bad the movie doesn’t deserve his performance. The script is riddled with musical biopic cliches and, more damning, a poor grasp of what depression is. 

Cards on the table: I am a very big Bruce guy, and Nebraska is my favorite album. As someone who’s had his own bouts with depression, it’s moving to hear a man in the throes of it attempting to purge himself of demons he doesn’t understand through artistic expression. At the time, Springsteen was heavily inspired by Flannnery O’Connor’s short stories (been there!) and Terrence Malick’s Badlands (ditto!), finding a kindred spirit in these luckless losers and burnt-out criminals. Some men will literally record a folk album instead of going to therapy. 

Nebraska, like much of Springsteen’s work, is a project about masculinity in crisis. Springsteen grasps the appeal of the American male ideal—James Dean and his girl on a motorcycle, peeling out towards bright futures and new horizons—but he also understands how far reality falls from those dreams. Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River, and even Born in the U.S.A. are full of these characters: men who’ve found that Thunder Road hits a dead end. 

“A lot of my music deals with the idea of American isolation, which pours out of the streak of individualism that is a part of the country’s personality,” he told The New York Times earlier this year. “And also out of depression. You feel very isolated and alone. So, I have a lot of characters who are fundamentally loners, which is a big part of my personality.”

READ MORE: Springsteen Despises Trump. But He’s Not Your Liberal Mascot.

But Nebraska, more than any other Bruce album, is steeped in darkness. Take the haunted title track, which tells the true story of Charles Starkweather’s murder spree from the first-person perspective of the killer himself, who can only explain his drive to kill by speculating that “I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” This might as well be Nebraska’s thesis statement. It was only years later that Springsteen would finally understand that the darkness came from within, and songwriting was no substitute for professional help. 

Deliver Me From Nowhere tries to tell this story with a heavy dose of black-and-white flashbacks, using Springsteen’s troubled relationship with his father (a wasted performance from Stephen Graham) as the Rosetta stone through which to interpret those grownup struggles. It’s a tidy explainer that results in some insultingly pat scenes of childhood trauma getting the one-to-one comparison to adult depression. The movie seems to believe that when a bad thing happens to a child, a rhyming bad thing will haunt them as an adult. This shallow understanding of depression’s deep waters speaks to how the word “trauma” got clumsily reworked into a catch-all term for “something bad that happened when I was little.” It also speaks to how poorly depression is understood, still—particularly among men. 

I say particularly among men, because many women have normalized mental health conversations in a way men have not. Deliver Me From Nowhere at least kind of understands this, giving Springsteen a girlfriend named Faye (Odessa Young, playing a thinly written composite of several real girlfriends) who tries to help her boyfriend face his monsters with cute therapy-speak along the lines of “you just can’t see what’s right in front of you” and “you’re not moving away, you’re running away.” Women in this movie exist as sounding boards for the men, and while Faye seems to understand Springsteen is dealing with something enormous and complex, the movie itself can’t resist deploying/casting the convenient villain of a distant father as the main boss of depression.

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It would be nice if all of us struggling with depression could trace it back to a single origin point, like Peter Parker with the spider bite. This would mean depression is a math problem to be solved, or better yet, a knot that can be untangled. This has not been my experience with depression, no matter how much time and professional help I’ve put into it. It’s true that life circumstances like bad dads, difficult marriages, or stressful jobs can exacerbate depression, but mental health is not a garden that will flourish if you can just pull the right weeds. It’s more like a symphony with a thousand instruments; you can take this or that instrument down in the mix, but you can’t kick any of them out of the orchestra altogether, and the music never stops.  

Nebraska understands this better than its movie does. The album ends with “Reason to Believe,” which tells a series of short stories of people at the end of their rope who are finding, against all odds, something that compels them to soldier on. Most of these stories take place in or around churches—a groom waiting for his runaway bride, a family baptizing a baby—which might be why Bruce breaks into prayer in the middle: “Lord, won’t you tell us, tell us what does it mean? That at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.” 

Is this a prayer of optimism, with Springsteen encouraged by people’s steadfast hope in the face of despair? Or is Springsteen, like Shakespeare’s Puck, exclaiming, “What fools these mortals be!” The answer might be somewhere in the middle. Depression and hope are rarely straightforward binaries; you find one buried in the other. 

Springsteen calls himself a “lapsed Catholic” and has historically been more interested in religion as a potent metaphor than an actual practice but told The Times that things might be evolving there: “I’ve written a few songs recently that are different from anything I’ve written before, and explore that part of my own spiritual experience and upbringing a little deeper.” 

It sounds like Springsteen’s journey with purpose and hope is an ongoing one. In my own mental health journey, his body of work has been helpful, in the way that music can be. Songs like “Badlands” and “For You” have made feel seen when nothing else has. Even the title Nebraska was revolutionary for me growing up in the Cornhusker State, a place otherwise ignored by popular culture. Springsteen’s great gift as a writer is telling small, specifically detailed stories that end up feeling universal. Deliver Me From Nowhere tells a universal story about mental health that ends up feeling too specific to the experience of one depressed rock star to be of much general interest. 

 It’s understandable but unfortunate that Cooper felt the need to drop in so many scenes from Malick’s Badlands, a masterful movie with actual insights about American masculinity in crisis mode. It invites a comparison that Deliver Me From Nowhere can’t help but suffer from. But the real unfortunate comparison is to Springsteen’s own body of work, which is rich in its exploration of where people in despair turn to for hope, while avoiding the sort of easy fixes the movie wants to offer. Deliver Me From Nowhere wants to save Bruce from his sadness; Nebraska knows that sometimes salvation just means learning to live with your ghosts until light finds its way in.

Nebraska, like much of Springsteen’s work, is a project about masculinity in crisis.