Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere isn’t going to serve as a cornerstone portrait of the artist, or cement Jeremy Allen White’s stardom the way that last year’s A Complete Unknown did for Timothée Chalamet. I’ve written exhaustively about how Scott Cooper’s film fails Nebraska specifically, but it also broadly fails to live up to the emotionality of Springsteen’s music as a whole because of that necessary rock-and-hard-place it’s stuck in with its particular pinpoint of time in the artist’s life. Warren Zanes’ book that the film adapts from picks probably the most interesting time to write about Springsteen, because often Springsteen as a person isn’t all that interesting—he’s famous, but he doesn’t hold any out-there political beliefs, has a barely sordid love life by rock star standards, and isn’t eccentric in any of his tastes. He’s kind of normal, which is a key to the appeal. Instead of being interesting on his own, what makes him a good artist is expressing a kind of melancholy and anger, often filtered through an ostensibly harmonious yet surprisingly discordant exuberance.
More than any filmmaker that’s attempted to imbue the spirit of Springsteen into their work, John Sayles understands this. This comes out in his trio of music videos he did for Born in the U.S.A. (the title track, “I’m on Fire,” and “Glory Days”), but it was there in his work from the jump, albeit more directly politically-infused. Take Sayles’ debut Return of the Secaucus Seven, a reunion of college friends reminiscing about their more explosive youths against the staid and struggling working class adulthood they’ve aged into. They still feel as strongly as ever, but are worn down, lacking that vigor that once got them all arrested on their way to a protest in DC. While not directly related, one could imagine the appeal that Springsteen’s music might have for these beaten-down (but relatively still young) Boomers—Springsteen’s vigorous, poppy rock with stage shows that roll for hours and hours, provides something of an antidote to the more “boring” lives they have to lead now; they have an outlet in Bruce.
The greatest Springsteen movie ever made is Sayles’ first studio film, Baby It’s You, tracking the romance between New Jersey high school lovers from the opposite side of the tracks, Jill (Rosanna Arquette) and Sheik (Vincent Spano). Here, Springsteen’s music is anachronistic—and it doesn’t matter, it fits Baby It’s You’s romance perfectly despite its setting slightly predating Springsteen’s ensemble. There’s the swaggering keys on “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” as Sheik pulls up a seat next to Jill in the cafeteria, or the way the whole band swings to “The E Street Shuffle” as the pair meet up for their first date. There’s even that sense of daring and danger which often sweeps up Springsteen’s music, like when Sheik knocks over the tuxedo rental shop during the prom and the guitars kick in on “She’s the One” like his heart suddenly started beating again. And when Sheik is at his lowest much later in the film, his anger is given voice through Springsteen’s furious “Adam Raised a Cain.”
What Sayles understands so well about Springsteen’s music is that it’s not revelatory, but expressive; it’s evocative rather than provocative. Sayles uses Springsteen’s music to heighten the emotion of Baby It’s You beyond what can be seen. There are moments where the director can show us exactly how the characters feel (who can’t immediately fall in love with Rosanna Arquette the moment that Spano first lays eyes on her?), but the soundtrack also plays as shorthand for what the character is presently moving through, which we get to move along with them.
Baby It’s You is also exceptional in the way that it elevates Springsteen’s music in turn: Sayles takes the unspoken political implications of Springsteen’s milieu and transposes a point on it about the cultural divide amongst Baby Boomers. Out of Springsteen’s declining New Jersey comes Jill and Sheik, the former an upwardly mobile college-bound girl and the latter a loser who dreams of making it big singing club music. While Sheik is stuck entertaining geriatrics with Sinatra, Jill is getting into weed and The Velvet Underground. Jill, in her mobility, can ride the wave of culture and counterculture as if it all comes naturally. Meanwhile, Sheik’s poor economic foundation leaves him stranded on the streets, with the only way he sees as an out is how well he can hustle his way up. The more that time moves, the more these two are inevitably, impossibly apart. Regardless, they’ll always have the memory of Sheik driving Jill in his friend’s car, running through the back alleys and New Jersey streets like a few minutes of road could last forever.