Bruce Springsteen showed up at the New York Film Festival for the screening of a movie about his life, and gave the crowd a musical pep talk about living through \u201cparticularly dangerous times\u201d in America during Donald Trump\u2019s presidency. <\/p>\n
Scott Cooper\u2019s film Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere<\/i> – the Boss\u2019 last name has recently been added to the original title – was shown as the NYFF\u2019s Spotlight Gala feature at Lincoln Center on Sunday.<\/p>\n
After the showing of the film about the making of Springsteen\u2019s stark, haunted 1982 masterpiece Nebraska<\/i>, Cooper introduced Jeremy Allen White, who stars as Springsteen, and Jeremy Strong, who plays his manager Jon Landau.<\/p>\n
The director and screenwriter of the movie based on Warren Zanes\u2019 2023 book Deliver Me From Nowhere<\/i><\/a> also brought on stage Landau and actors Stephen Graham and Gaby Hoffman, who play Springsteen\u2019s father and mother, Matthew Anthony Pellicano Jr., who plays young Bruce and Australian actress Odessa Young. <\/p>\n Young, who\u2019s father performs in a Springsteen cover band, plays Springsteen\u2019s love interest in the film, though as Cooper accurately put it, the real love story in the film is between Springsteen and Landau, \u201chis manager, confidant, artistic collaborator and part-time therapist.\u201d<\/p>\n Cooper brought Springsteen on stage and called him \u201ceverything and more than you would expect.\u201d Cooper shared that when his house in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles burned earlier this year Springsteen moved him into his own home.<\/p>\n The director then led the others offstage to \u201cleave it to the man himself.\u201d Springsteen was then handed an acoustic guitar he referred to as \u201cmy weapon of choice.\u201d<\/p>\n Springsteen joked that Pellicano, a 9 year old from Bergen County in North Jersey who recently got his first guitar, \u201chas some difficult choices ahead. That\u2019s all I can tell him. But I\u2019ll declare him the future of rock n\u2019 roll tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n He thanked Cooper who \u201ctook a very personal moment in my life, and he honored my experience, my work and my family.\u201d and he shouted out Paul Schrader, the Taxi Driver<\/i> director whose script for a movie that was to be called Born in the U.S.A.<\/i> provided Springsteen with a title for an album that would be the biggest seller of his career. <\/a><\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know where the f\u2014 any of us would be without Paul Schrader,\u201d Springsteen said with a laugh. \u201cHe was alway good about me stealing the title of his film.\u201d (The movie was eventually made as 1987\u2019s Michael J. Fox and Joan Jett-starring Light of Day<\/i>, with a title song by Springsteen).<\/p>\n \u00bb READ MORE: Bruce Springsteen calls Trump administration \u2018corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous\u2019 in European tour opener<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n Then, Springsteen got serious. <\/p>\n He gave a short speech before finishing off the night with a rousing rendition of \u201cLand Of Hope and Dreams,\u201d the title song to his recent live EP. That EP includes a speech in which he calls the Trump administration \u201ccorrupt, incompetent and treasonous\u201d – to which the President responded by calling Springsteen a \u201cdried prune of a rocker\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n \u201cLast thoughts, last thoughts,\u201d Springsteen said at the premier. \u201cThese days, you know, we have daily events reminding us of the fact that we\u2019re living through these particularly dangerous times. <\/p>\n \u201cI spent my life on the road, moving around the world as kind of a musical ambassador for America, trying to measure the distance between American reality, where we\u2019ve often fall short of our ideals in the American dream. <\/p>\n \u201cI see that America, as battered as she feels right now. But for a lot of folks out there, she continues to be a land of hope and dreams, not of fear or divisiveness or government censorship or hatred. That America is worth fighting for.\u201d<\/p>\n Other luminaries at the screening included E Street Band members Steven Van Zandt and Max Weinberg and music executive Jimmy Iovine, whose voice is heard in the movie in a phone conversation with Landau as he expresses exasperation that Springsteen wants to release the stripped-down Nebraska<\/i> rather than an album led with the more commercially viable \u201cBorn in the U.S.A.\u201d<\/p>\n