By Yulia Tulegenova, Film critic

We have a Bruce Springsteen film. Finally. For years, the musical biopic has been churning out these big, glossy cradle-to-grave epics, ticking off the greatest hits and the personal tragedies like items on a shopping list. But Springsteen always felt… different. Too complex, too real, for that kind of treatment. How do you even begin to tell that story?

Well, the director Scott Cooper has an answer. You don’t. You don’t try to tell the whole story. You just pick a moment. A very specific, very strange, very quiet moment. You pick Nebraska.

And on paper, that is a brilliant idea. Genius, even.

Because Nebraska, the album from 1982, isn’t just a collection of songs. It’s a legend. It’s the story of the biggest rock star in the world, fresh off a massive stadium tour, retreating to a rented house in New Jersey with a four-track recorder and just… making this thing. This sparse, dark, haunting album of stories about losers and killers and forgotten people. It was the first proper lo-fi album, they say. Not because he couldn’t afford a studio, but because he chose not to use one. It was a deliberate act of intimacy. A whisper after years of shouting.

So you have your story. An artist at the peak of his fame, battling his own demons, turning away from the machine and creating his most personal, most difficult work. It’s a perfect setup for a film. It has everything. The tortured artist, the creative breakthrough, the conflict with the record company who, understandably, didn’t know what to do with this collection of bleak acoustic demos.

And who do you get to play him? You get Jeremy Allen White. The star of The Bear, an actor who has practically patented a kind of beautiful, simmering, working-class anxiety. It’s perfect casting. The whole thing is perfectly set up.

And then you watch the film. And you’re just left with one question. How did they get it so wrong?

Because this film, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, is a masterclass in taking a fascinating, complex story and sanding it down until it’s completely smooth, completely safe, and completely, utterly boring.

What actually happens in this film? Not a lot. Jeremy Allen White sits around a lot, looking moody. He stares out of windows. He drives his car, meaningfully. He has a half-hearted romance that goes nowhere. He argues, politely, with his manager, played by Jeremy Strong. And, of course, we get the black-and-white flashbacks to his childhood, with his tough, unloving father. Just in case we didn’t get the message about where all this angst comes from.

It’s a film that mistakes mood for meaning. It’s beautifully shot, no question. The cinematographer, Masanobu Takayanagi, makes New Jersey in the early 80s look like a Terence Malick film. There are lots of lovely shots of water and sky and birds. But it’s just window dressing. It’s a collection of beautifully composed, dramatically inert scenes that never add up to a story.

I remember watching Crazy Heart, Scott Cooper’s earlier film about a country singer, which won Jeff Bridges a long-overdue Oscar. And it had the same problem. It looked the part, it sounded the part, but it felt hollow. A postcard from the world of country music, not a letter from the heart of it. This feels the same.

And the performance from Jeremy Allen White? He’s clearly worked his socks off. He’s got the posture, the mumbling intensity, the way Springsteen holds himself on stage. But it’s a performance that feels like it’s in quotation marks. He’s not inhabiting the character; he’s presenting a very well-researched, very detailed imitation of him. It’s more like a brilliant A-level drama project than a living, breathing performance. There’s a lot of acting going on, but you never for a second forget you’re watching an actor.

The problem, really, is the script. It’s just so… respectful. So timid. It takes this moment of genuine artistic risk, this howl of a record, and turns it into a tasteful, sentimental therapy session. The message seems to be that depression is a serious illness, and it’s okay to not be okay, even if you’re The Boss. Which is a fine message. A worthy message. But it’s not a drama.

The film is so terrified of saying anything new or controversial about its subject that it ends up saying nothing at all. It just gestures vaguely towards a kind of romantic, photogenic sadness. The kind of sadness you can have when you’ve got a guitar and a vinyl collection and a cool car to drive around in while you think your deep thoughts.

You compare it to what James Mangold and Timothée Chalamet did with the Bob Dylan story a year ago. That film took risks. It played with form, it ignored the clichés. It understood that a great artist deserves a film that is as bold and unpredictable as they are. This film just feels like a very expensive, very well-made episode of Behind the Music.

It’s a missed opportunity. A huge one. They had the perfect story, the perfect actor, the perfect moment. And they just… fumbled it. They made a film about the making of a raw, dangerous, brutally honest record that is itself none of those things. It’s a safe, predictable, and ultimately empty tribute. And Bruce Springsteen, of all people, deserves so much better than that.