{"id":2296887,"date":"2026-02-24T05:16:51","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T05:16:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2296887"},"modified":"2026-02-24T05:16:51","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T05:16:51","slug":"deliver-me-from-nowhere-was-sabotaged-by-the-celebrity-media-complex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/deliver-me-from-nowhere-was-sabotaged-by-the-celebrity-media-complex\/","title":{"rendered":"Deliver Me From Nowhere” was sabotaged by the Celebrity\/Media Complex."},"content":{"rendered":"

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I sat in an otherwise empty theater in Virginia Monday night to watch the dramatic film, <\/span>Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. And even as I watched <\/span>The Bear star Jeremy Allen White work heroically to try embodying a depressed Bruce Springsteen flailing to cope with a meteoric fame he knew was coming, I mostly saw an ambitious film sabotaged by connection to its subject and hamstrung by reaction to other movies about rock stars.<\/span><\/p>\n

But I also saw a film that, through its omissions, says a lot about the Celebrity\/Media complex we\u2019re now living in. And it\u2019s a take complicated by my own experiences covering The Boss when I was a music critic at his hometown paper, <\/span>The Asbury Park Press.<\/p>\n

So I want to take a little space on Substack to talk about music, media, journalism and Springsteen history. Here we go\u2026<\/p>\n

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First, the spoiler alert: Though the film centers on Springsteen\u2019s creation of the stark 1982 acoustic album <\/span>Nebraska — just before he would release the album which cemented his superstar status, <\/span>Born in the USA, in 1984 \u2013 <\/span>Deliver Me From Nowhere<\/strong> is really about his early struggles with depression.<\/strong><\/p>\n

While we see him huddled with guitars and a four-track tape recorder at a rental home in Colts Neck, NJ, hiding from the world after his album <\/span>The River blew up on rock radio, we only hear snippets of the haunting songs he created there. The film spends more time on Springsteen\u2019s inability to recreate his bedroom recordings in a big studio than any one song from a record that is literally the focus of the entire narrative.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Instead, we get a lot of flashbacks to his childhood, with his dad played by the most excellent English actor Stephen Graham, showing how influence from a father with undiagnosed mental issues may have led his rock star son to fall into a similar abyss amid the pressure of following up <\/span>The River.<\/p>\n

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I can understand why filmmakers went this route. It focuses storytelling on a time when The Boss was mostly isolated, struggling to figure out life on his own. So they didn\u2019t need to find great actors who could hold a scene with White and also pretend to be Springsteen\u2019s legendary bandmates with their own outsize personalities, like future <\/span>Sopranos co-star \u201cMiami\u201d Steve Van Zandt and the late, lamented Big Man on saxophone, Clarence Clemons.<\/span><\/p>\n

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