Springsteen: Review of ‘Rescue Me From Nowhere’ – A Serious, Pensive Portrait of the President’s Crisis Years | film

THis Boss-olatrous only partially escapes the clichés of musical films. This happens when Bruce Springsteen finally leaves his New Jersey stronghold, and sees a shrinkage in the shallow Los Angeles where he bought a house. Otherwise, it’s bits of expository dialogue (“I’m just trying to find something real in the noise!”, “It’s like he’s channeling something very personal!”), black-and-white flashbacks to his rough upbringing, and scenes in the recording studio with producers and executives looking on in amazement behind the glass as the magic happens. And there are some very strange things in Bruce’s romantic life.

Jeremy Allen White does a smart, committed job as Springsteen; Jeremy Strong gives his best shot in the dull role of Bruce’s manager and friend Jon Landau, and Stephen Graham is Springsteen’s abusive but troubled father Douglas, with whom Springsteen finally reconciles. In fact, White and Graham have the best scene in the movie, one that’s so bizarre it has to be real. Springsteen’s old father, humbly and repentantly waiting in the President’s dressing room after the show, asks Bruce in a voice full of pity to sit on his knee and Springsteen has to gently point out that he is a grown man and in fact has never done this before in his life, not even as a child.

The film’s drama represents a key moment of emotional and artistic crisis in Springsteen’s life: the recording of his radical acoustic album Nebraska in 1982, which was composed and recorded largely in the bedroom of his New Jersey home. It was an artistic indulgence that the record company nervously allowed because they carried in their back pockets the sensational track that would later catapult Springsteen into the stratosphere: Born in the USA. The album is inspired by characters as diverse as Flannery O’Connor and notorious Nebraska killer Charles Starkweather, the model for Martin Sheen in Terrence Malick’s film Badlands. It’s also about whether you should embrace your hometown or escape it.

All this is not exceptional enough. But the film also invents for Springsteen an imaginary friend named Faye Romano, played by Odessa Young, who is supposedly the sister of a man from the old neighborhood; She has a daughter from a previous relationship. Springsteen dates Faye with all her realism and integrity, but eventually leaves her behind. So what about Faye’s daughter? She’s been encouraged to think of Bruce as her stepfather, and will she ever think of Bruce in those heart-wrenching black-and-white flashback terms? Or are she and her mother just there to emphasize Bruce’s blue-collar masculinity? The film is a derivative of fan fiction, if well-intentioned.