Why Deliver Me From Nowhere Is the Perfect Bruce Springsteen Movie Pitch

The story is small scale and deeply personal — but also examines what makes the “Born to Run” star a compelling artist.

Jeremy Allen White, the star of The Bear and one of those actors who is currently being fancast in just about everything, recently signed on to play rock icon Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere. The biopic will center on the development of Nebraska, Springsteen’s groundbreaking 1983 album, and is based on the book by Warren Zanes’ 2023 book Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. Not only is Nebraska a favorite album among music critics and hardcore Springsteen fans, but the way it came together was uniquely strange, making it a perfect candidate for a movie.

Coming off the huge success of The River, Springsteen set about making his next record with the E Street Band. About halfway through the Born in the USA sessions, though, Springsteen had written a number of songs he was really passionate about — but that just weren’t coming together with the band. Those songs (except the song “Born in the U.S.A.,” which he held onto for the full band record) became Nebraska, Springsteen’s spare acoustic album filled with songs about desperate, violent people.

Nebraska wasn’t a record that had a bunch of hit singles like The River or Born in the U.S.A. did — but it earned him the respect of a lot of critics and music nerds who had previously seen Springsteen as less serious than some of his contemporaries. At the time, nobody knew that this creative milestone had only happened after a truly bizarre story of the album’s creation, and alongside Springsteen suffering with serious mental health struggles for the first time.

In Deliver Me From Nowhere, Zanes pointed out that Springsteen was also quietly using his power in the industry to help more esoteric acts like Rik Ocasek and Suicide win some of their fights with the record company, boosting his cred as an “artist’s artist.”

Zanes’s book is incredibly well-structured, well-researched, and has a number of scenes that read as cinematic. You can easily imagine how it will translate well to the screen. As much as that, it’s a story that takes place over a very concentrated period of time, and gives clear stakes and a clear victory at the end. That’s something that wouldn’t work with, say, Springsteen’s sprawling autobiography Born to Run (although a documentary on the making of the actual album Born to Run, included on an anniversary reissue, proves that story could also be a decent movie).

Springsteen’s reputation is outsized, and it’s easy for him to become a larger-than-life caricature like Dylan or Elvis. Those artists, too, have films that have either come out recently or will come out shortly before Deliver Me From Nowhere, and a big part of their story is humanizing the artist and taking away some of that mythology. Deliver Me From Nowhere, with its focus on Springsteen’s frustrating artistic struggles and personal demons, is perfectly suited to that task.

Deliver Me From Nowhere will be written and directed by Crazy Heart‘s Scott Cooper. Producers will include Zanes, Cooper, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Eric Robinson, and outgoing Netflix executive Scott Stuber. Springsteen, as well as his longtime manager Jon Landau (who has a kinda-sorta successful side gig as the producer of James Cameron’s Avatar movies), will both be involved with the development of Deliver Me From Nowhere.