Review: Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Rescue Me from Nowhere at New York Film Festival

The first and last scenes of any movie are crucial, and in these bookends you can find the entire story Springsteen: Save me from nowhere. Unfortunately, almost everything in between is standard biopic filler and reinforces filmmaker Scott Cooper’s unique position in the Hollywood landscape: he’s a great actor’s director but fairly unremarkable in most other parts of his job.

Based on Warren Zanes’ biography of Bruce Springsteen (directed and written by Cooper), the film tells the story of how the famed heartland rocker came to create nebraska— perhaps his most time-tested album — but it has little to say beyond observing his emotional distress during this period, often from a dramatic distance. Although this includes a focus on a one-year period, save me from nowhere It’s a decades-spanning saga that tells mostly “true stories” about revered figures, depicting in monochrome a young Springsteen (Matthew Pellicano Jr.) listening to his father (Stephen Graham) abuse his mother (Gaby Hoffman) in the next room. From his ghostly expression and the tight editing of adult Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) in 1981’s “Born to Run,” a loud, sweeping performance, creates an odd but fitting thematic connection between these childhood events and Springsteen’s ’70s hits. Whatever the song is actually about (in short: a girl), its lyrics here become an obvious cipher for a man fleeing his past at the speed of light. It would be nice if the rest of the movie could keep up this momentum.

As mentioned before, save me from nowhere In fact, it ends in a touching gesture of catharsis, so in theory one could string together these brief opening and closing acts to create a more impactful short without losing too much in terms of story. Audiences, however, will be deprived of the real joy of Scott Cooper’s co-production: a broad range of comic characters imbued with beating humanity in a way that few American filmmakers are capable of. When Springsteen began work on his next album, he viewed the process as a long-overdue exorcism of the personal demons that his label executives and others were working to exorcise. Hope the radio station has more hits. The Boss, however, is largely immune to these demands, with only his manager and producer Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) asserting on his behalf.

There’s little overt drama in this side of things—the logistics of creating the next big hit or cultural phenomenon—despite the many arguments that play out within the confines of different offices. It might be interesting to watch on its own terms, however, as Landau became the de facto point of view figure for a long period of time, talking about Springsteen’s genius to anyone who would listen (including, notably, Columbia Records executive David Krumholz) while giving virtually no pushback to the artist himself. There is a feeling of inevitability nebraska about to be born (and the iconic born in united states After it, it uses many of his original concepts from the former). For one thing, this rarely gives the movie any meaningful stakes. On the other hand, it allowed Strong to create a cautiously eager version of Landau who almost betrayed his admiration for Springsteen. Likewise, Paul Walter Hauser plays an enthusiastic recording engineer who goes along with Springsteen’s deliberately lo-fi plan Nebraska, Marc Maron plays a mostly silent studio mixer who basically goes along with it despite some questionable reactions. After all, who was he and who were they to question the boss?

This kind of idolatry is often the raison d’etre of jukebox “IP” biopics, e.g. Save me from nowhere, Strong’s doting gaze reflects a refreshing honesty in hagiography. Granted, the film doesn’t veer into full-blown boss propaganda for the personal part of the story, in which he falls into a romance with radiant single mother Faye Romano (Odessa Young), a relationship that feels doomed to fail, as inevitable as the film’s making —nebraska half. He offers her a preview of what will inevitably happen—he can’t promise to love her as long as the album and its ghost hang around his neck—but with the film’s parameters clearly established both in the studio and behind closed doors, there’s little reason to watch it other than the performance. Springsteen will prioritize his work, people will praise his musical talent, and he will eventually confront past trauma, but these are not part of a story in which Springsteen’s or anyone’s human impulses might temporarily derail the inevitable.

White’s vision of Springsteen is a delight, not just because he mimics the boss’s raspy voice and blood-curdling performance, but because he conjures Springsteen’s spirit through exaggeration. He creates a sense of emotion (and moodiness) that the film probably can’t contain, brooding to the extreme, sitting in diner booths in Jersey and New York, hunched over and leaning so hard that he threatens to collapse. He doesn’t play Springsteen so much as he plays an imaginary, effortlessly cool, tortured version of what James Dean might have played, and save me from nowhere Slightly better. Masanobu Takayanagi’s cinematography deftly outlines the superstar, turning him into an icon even in mundane scenes, and the film has a monumental physical structure even though it has almost zero emotional structure.

Cliched dialogue formats abound, but when imbued with enough cinematic enthusiasm—what Springsteen calls “finding the silence in the noise”—can transcend their appearance and become joyous. Unfortunately, here they end up being covered newspapers that struggle to convey meaning.

There are plenty of film references in the book, from Springsteen’s discovery of dark themes through the films of Terrence Malick to flashbacks of his admiration for the gorgeous films of Charles Laughton night of the hunter and his father. But these only serve as mood boards, presented as they are when Springsteen watches them, rather than having a stylistic or thematic impact on the artist or the film as a whole. They’re a reminder that Cooper invested relatively little style or philosophy in his works, even though his protagonists can see them, enjoy them, and be affected by them in a way that makes his wheels quietly turn. But what this effect causes, and what synapses it fires, remain a mystery.

In the final analysis, save me from nowhere It’s a film worth watching and observing, as Cooper crafts his incomprehensible version of Springsteen, whose troubles hung like a dark cloud over his creative process. But the footage rarely goes beyond the raw surface it creates to explore these questions or Springsteen’s connection to the many lyrics we see him jot down throughout its run. “Double album??” he scrawled somewhere and underlined it twice in a hilarious way that ended up carrying as much weight and meaning as any of Springsteen’s actual lyrics — in a movie that was nominally about the pain of their lives. certainly. Double album. why not?