running back to new jersey
a "review" of Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025)
Many of you will open this up assuming that somewhere in here you’ll find an answer to the question “was Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025) a good film?” But let me tell you right now: that is the wrong question. It might even be a stupid question. The correct one, of course, is: will Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere provoke in you a mad desire to visit America’s most misunderstood and frankly underrated state, Gracie Lou Freebush’s New Jersey? And the answer to that query is a most resounding yes.
You thought Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere would be a film about Bruce Springsteen? You fool. You innocent little lamb, you. No. Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is about Jeremy Allen White wearing brown contacts and cunty little leather jackets and having bad posture (hot). Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is a film about Jeremy Strong sitting in horrendously carpeted rooms, trying out accents that have never before been spoken in the history of moving pictures. It is about being sweaty on a stage in New Jersey.
And spiritually, you understand, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is about how we should all join a union. No, I will not be elaborating.
Was it good … please … what an irrelevant question. This film awakened things in me that could only be cured by a late-night drive to Wawa, windows down as I speed down Route 38 so my eyes can really absorb the roadside billboards’ fluorescent lights.
P.S. Slight sidebar! Thanks to my beloved Luce over at shit you should care about, we have a lot of new readers here, which is wonderful—welcome, etc.—but inevitably makes me nervous because I’m constantly overthinking first impressions. If you’re curious as to the general vibe here at Hmm, here are a couple of recentish posts you can peruse, free to read:
If you simply must have a plot summary, here’s one: immediately following the tour for his 1980 album The River, Bruce Springsteen goes home to Freehold, New Jersey, where an isolated rental house awaits him, his solitude, and his collection of checkered shirts; therein, presumably in an attempt to escape the godawful wallpaper that surround him, he begins to (1) mentally unravel and (2) work on Nebraska, a folk-adjacent album that will prove a marked departure from the music that first made him famous. He also dates a woman played by Odessa Young, an actress who, no matter how many times I opened IMDb to check, is not Reneé Rapp or even related to Reneé Rapp, even though she often looks more like Reneé Rapp than Reneé Rapp herself. Nevertheless. We persist.1
We can thank The Bear for providing White with ample opportunity to perfect his Portrait of the Artist Beset by Childhood Trauma, because even with the brown contacts, the tortured soul comes across loud and clear. In all seriousness, there are few actors working today who can transmit the oppressive feeling of all-encompassing loneliness as well as Jeremy Allen White. Congrats on the mental illness, babe.
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Despite concern from his team that his new songs are less commercial than what he’s previously released, Bruce carries on, fueled by the febrile energy of a new relationship and the very specific melancholy that comes with a change of seasons. Famously, label executives really love it when an artist who’s made them money with one kind of music begins to experiment with their sound, which is why Strong, as Bruce’s manager and unlicensed therapist, has his work cut out for him as he says things like “in this office we believe in Bruce Springsteen” with a turtleneck and a straight face.
It works, is the thing.
Like most work about and by the Boss, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is sponsored by the Garden State, and there’s no one who appreciates that more than me, woman who lived two formative years in Cherry Hill, NJ. There are early morning shots of the sun coming up over Bruce’s rental house so breathtaking they’ll make you believe in God, Atlantic City montages that’ll make you wanna rewatch Boardwalk Empire,2 and scenes in Bruce’s car that’ll briefly make you forget New Jersey is home to the meanest, kindest drivers you’ll ever meet.
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Reading this, I’d understand if you assumed I grew up a diehard Springsteen fan. Easy leap to make, sure. And while it is true that I do have your classic Eldest Daughter Raised by Her Father’s Musical Influences complex, we were more of a Phil Collins household. Drum solos are now very important to me.
All to say, I’ve spent the last 24 hours catching up on Bruce’s discography, toggling between Nebraska and Rosalía’s LUX.3 The songs on Nebraska (1982) are cries for help (complimentary), and if I were a more insane person I’d be like “Nebraska … the original Folklore.”
If the film is to be believed, these are songs borne of Springsteen’s extended bout of early 1980s nostalgia, which will be familiar to anyone who’s ever turned 30 and suddenly found themselves inexplicably ensconced within and hyperfixated on a specific three-month period of their childhood. You know—normal things.
Do the flashbacks (helpfully in black and white, like we’d miss the temporary shift back to the 1950s despite the fashion and the vehicles and the Vague but Instantly Recognizable Aura of National Malaise Disguised as Eisenhower Optimism) to said childhood work? Not really! Dramaturgically, I wouldn’t say it made much sense. But I’m fairly invested in Gaby Hoffmann and Stephen Graham keeping their SAG memberships, so far be it from me to protest.
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Born In The U.S.A. was not released until 1984, but a lot of the songs from that album were written and originally recorded at the same time as Nebraska, which is why it absolutely undid me when everyone in Bruce’s circle of trust was shocked that the guy who wrote “Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull/And cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my skull” was emotionally unstable. Well, yes! In my limited experience, mentally well people do not dream of lobotomies.
You know what, though? He bravely paved the way for complex Jersey men in therapy … and for that, in this house, Bruce Springsteen is a hero.
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Also in the picture, for some reason: Marc Maron, along with Meryl Streep’s The Newsroom daughter (not to be confused with Meryl Streep’s Gilded Age daughter … know your HBO shows, please).
I remain the only person I know who has seen this show in its entirety. If Steve Buscemi has no fans I’m dead, etc.
It’s called range.
South Jersey hive reporting for duty!!! Hadn’t really lived here since high school but recently moved back and am in Voorhees! Loved the review!
Clara you are an icon