How Springsteen Tried to Do Something Different
There has been an increasing demand for music biopics following the success of Bohemian Rhapsody in 2018. That film made a shocking amount of money, grossing over $900 million worldwide and winning four Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Rami Malek. This dual achievement prompted a resurgence for the genre. Since then, there have been biopics of Elton John, Whitney Houston, Elvis Presley, and, most recently, Bob Dylan. That film, A Complete Unknown, was released just last year and nearly won Timothée Chalamet his elusive Oscar.
The recency of A Complete Unknown certainly made the comparisons with Springsteen inevitable. However, the former film took a fairly standard approach in its narrative. Director James Mangold relied heavily on Chalamet’s showy transformation while recounting already much-discussed events like Dylan’s Greenwich Village days to when he went electric. That approach paid off with the film becoming one of the few recent Best Picture nominees this decade to earn both money and acclaim.
Scott Cooper could have taken a similar approach with Springsteen. However, rather than chronicle the Boss’s greatest hits, Cooper and his team opted to narrow their focus on a less documented moment in the global superstar’s career. Springsteen recounts the making of his sixth studio album, Nebraska, which was released in 1982. This was a period of personal struggle for the singer-songwriter, who used this body of work to confront his inner demons and his strained relationship with his father. In theory, this artistic swing should have allowed the audience to get an inside look at Springsteen the creative and the man.
[DISCLAIMER: Spoilers for Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere below]
Unfortunately, while the attempt is much appreciated, the result is half-baked. The creative process is famously a hard one to dramatize with concrete conflict, obstacles, and complications. Scott Cooper often defaults to endless montages of Springsteen scribbling notes and strumming his guitar, which are not that dramatically compelling.
Furthermore, another difficult phenomenon to dramatize is the process of coming to terms with one’s mental health challenges. One of the major arcs in this film culminates in Bruce going to therapy. When that scene finally happens, the moment quickly fades out and cuts to “10 months later” when he’s supposedly recovered. It’s a major cop out to avoid the very confrontation that the film rests on. It’s also a missed opportunity. Having a therapist character can be cheesy, but that other physical and potentially adversarial presence could have created more externalized conflict throughout the movie.
These structural weaknesses have nothing to do with Jeremy Allen White’s performance. In fact, his acting here is considerably different from, say, Chalamet’s Bob Dylan or Malek’s Freddie Mercury. White is more restrained and stripped back here, relying less on mimicry and more on emotional embodiment. Still, his quiet effortlessness might be confused for not being flashy enough. Both audiences and awards voters are clearly more swayed by larger-than-life, transformative work. That does not bode well for White’s upcoming awards campaign, which is already off to a shaky start given the film’s underwhelming reviews and box office earnings.
The Unavoidable Pitfalls of the Music Biopic
While the attempt to do something different with Springsteen was a noble undertaking, the film cannot help itself from avoiding the classic limitations of the music biopic genre. At the end of the day, what these films ultimately are able to cover is beholden to the wills of the artist’s estate and other legal concerns. In that respect, Bruce Springsteen himself deserves some credit for allowing the filmmakers to cover this darker period of his life.
However, liberties were still taken here that might raise some eyebrows. For instance, the love interest in this film is a fictionalized composite character meant to represent the multiple women Springsteen was casually dating during this time. A similar decision was made with Elle Fanning’s character in A Complete Unknown after the real Suze Rotolo had privately expressed a desire not to be portrayed. Springsteen could have benefited without this romantic subplot entirely. It doesn’t add anything substantial to the narrative, and Odessa Young is left with very little material to build a decent, three-dimensional character.
Biopics almost always suffer from estate problems. We will surely see another example in a few months when the Michael Jackson biopic is released. Of course, it makes sense for the estate to be protective of the portrait of an artist, but that protectiveness limits artistic capabilities and the pursuit of truth.
Devoted fanbases can also get in the way of artistic exploration. In Springsteen, this is exemplified by the inclusion of the making of “Born in the U.S.A,” one of the Boss’s most recognizable hits. You can easily imagine the creative conversations behind closed doors, pushing for the inclusion of just one famous song to cater to the fans. But that’s not what this story was supposed to be about, thereby making all the “Born in the U.S.A.” sequences feel out of place in the film.
At the end of the day, the final product of Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is a reflection of what happens when creatives are torn in incompatible directions. As a result, a worthy attempt to tell a lesser-known story with a different kind of lead performance was bogged down by inescapable genre limitations and the pressure to please everyone. The only way to transcend these constraints is to fully commit to your artistic vision and to throw all preconceived notions of what your film should or should not include out the window. Only then can a music biopic truly capture something brand new about the artist.
via @FilmUpdates