The makers of the upcoming Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere and the actor who plays him have been talking about the difficulties of bringing the film to screen.
As we all know by now, Deliver Me From Nowhere focuses on a specific portion of Springsteen’s long career – the early '80s, when, after the commercial success of The River album, he took a stylistic swerve and released an album of introspective songs recorded on the most basic of gear – Nebraska - as a follow-up.
The film then, doesn’t cleave to the tired old rags-to-riches, ‘gee-isn’t-fame-difficult’ narrative arc of most rock biopics. In a Guardian feature, writer/director Scott Cooper lists the problems that confronted him: “How do you capture the writing process in a cinematic way? How do you capture what a man is dealing with when he’s alone in his bedroom? How do you make the silence cinematic? How do you make a story about a man who is very interior, and who is unravelling, cinematic?”
The actor playing Springsteen also had to cut it musically. Jeremy Allen White is a non-musician who spent months learning how to play the guitar and impersonate Springsteen’s singing tone. For some while, he says he thought “there’s no way I’m capable of this and this is never going to come together”.
Springsteen himself was deeply involved in the film’s production and White then had the unenviable task of being Bruce Springsteen in front of the real Bruce Springsteen.
“There is an incredible weight to playing any real and especially living person,” White says. “That sense of responsibility is always going to be stronger and larger, especially when you are dealing with someone like Bruce who is known and loved by so many. I think in the beginning I was almost too concerned with my understanding of Bruce or the public’s understanding of Bruce and it was kind of paralysing at the start.
“After getting through that initial fear, I realised the only way to go about it and get in was to take Bruce Springsteen out of it and approach it as a young man who is a musician on the brink of this global stardom, who is trying to make a record and be inspired, while visiting his past and his home and his relationship to his family dynamics and trying to figure out what the future would hold … In order to get started, I almost had to forget him for a moment.”
Fans will get a chance to see what sort of job White has done when Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere hits cinemas on October 24.
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