Chris Christie can now add “film critic” to his resume, alongside other venerable titles like “former New Jersey governor,” and “two-time presidential also-ran.”
Christie was recently given the opportunity to review ”Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” for The Free Press, the commentary site recently acquired by CBS News.
“As the 55th Governor of New Jersey, it is just another one of the great opportunities the job has given me,” Christie wrote in a Friday social media post sharing the review.
Gubernatorial bona fides aside, Christie is an avowed Springsteen superfan, so it makes sense that The Free Press would come to him with this assignment.
Even less surprising is the fact that, in response, Christie cranked out less of a movie review and more of a 1,300-word love letter to the Boss that reads like a man confessing his sins at the altar of Asbury Park.
The headline: “Bruce Springsteen Has Done It Again.” The subtext: “Please, Bruce, text me back.”
Christie opens with a disclaimer that he’s “not objective” about Springsteen, sharing that the number of concerts he’s now attended has ticked north of 170. (He does not address that it’s long been less clear if those mushy feelings are reciprocated.)
What follows is a praise song for the new Springsteen biopic, filtered through the lens of a man who seems convinced the album “Nebraska” personally saved his life and maybe could’ve saved the Republican Party too, if anyone had listened.
In Christie’s telling, the film is “unexpected,” “dark,” and “deeply emotional.” He talks about the depiction of Bruce’s relationship with his father and his struggle with depression in tones usually reserved for Vatican miracles.
But then he shifts abruptly to his own experience of watching the movie, and how it brought memories of the release of “Nebraska” rushing back.
He recounts, with trembling reverence, the time he waited in line at a Delaware record shop to buy the album at midnight, only to discover it wasn’t full of stadium anthems but “a lone acoustic guitar and the depressing lyrics about a mass murderer.”
Chris, that’s the album. That’s the whole point.
But “Deliver Me from Nowhere,” Christie goes on to say, has a lesson to impart. It teaches us to face our demons. He wants us to feel Bruce’s pain, to see ourselves in his journey and triumph. He’s moved by the scene where Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) declares, “In this office, my office, we believe in Bruce Springsteen.” You can almost see Christie whispering that line to his reflection in a diner window.
And yet there’s something almost sweet about it. Christie’s not wrong that “Nebraska” is Bruce at his most raw and vulnerable. It’s just funny that a guy who once shut down a beach for everyone but himself wants to talk to us about loneliness.
He’s not wrong: In a way, Bruce Springsteen has done it again. And so, apparently, has Chris Christie — turning an ode to blue-collar angst into a deeply weird, faintly spiritual personal essay that sounds like a campaign stump speech for the soul.
AJ McDougall
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