<\/p>\n
The question of where artists get their ideas from is a time-honored one, and it’s almost as ubiquitous as the answers are mysterious. Most artists don’t have a succinct answer to the query, and that’s understandable, as everyone’s ideas tend to spawn from their own personal tastes, life experiences, and so on. Yet, what’s perhaps not talked about that often is how frequently artists are inspired by other art, especially within different mediums. Paintings can inspire books, novels can inspire films, movies can inspire music, and so on.<\/p>\n
The latter example is exactly the case with Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album “Nebraska,” and it’s something that filmmaker Scott Cooper makes sure to dramatize in his film “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.”<\/a> It’s a movie about The Boss’s struggle with depression and his traumatic past during the making of “Nebraska,” detailing how the very making of the album is what allows Bruce (played by Jeremy Allen White) to come to terms with these feelings within himself. As part of this process, Cooper shows how movies helped inspire Springsteen to find and hone in on these inner feelings, and the director uses two examples in particular: Terrence Malick’s “Badlands”<\/a> and Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter.” The former film is what sets Springsteen on the path to “Nebraska,” while the latter represents Bruce’s complicated relationship with his father, Douglas (Stephen Graham). It just so happens that both films are certified American classics, movies which are themselves about troubled men. As such, they not only inform Springsteen as a person but also as a character, and thus they influence “Deliver Me From Nowhere” as a film itself.<\/p>\n