I chuckled seeing the “first image” of Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen. It’s not that he looks miscast in the role, it’s just that he basically looks like … Jeremy Allen White. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big Springsteen fan, and will be seeing him again in concert this week, and White’s casting as the iconic singer-songwriter could turn out to be inspired casting.
Scott Cooper’s Springsteen biopic, which I had exclusively reported on right before the trades pounced on it, has begun production in New Jersey. The cast for the film is exemplary, you have White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham and Odessa Young. 20th Century is distributing and producing.
The film tackles the period in Springsteen’s life when he created his landmark “Nebraska” album in the early ‘80s. The story might just be the most fascinating time period of Springsteen’s career. During that time, the singer was going through a severe bout of depression and anxiety — he just didn’t know it. He created art through it, battling his inner demons by recording the spooky “Nebraska” tracks with a home recorder, alone in a bedroom, a “matter of months from a breakdown.”
In his memoir “Born to Run,” Springsteen writes of that time: “My depression is spewing like an oil spill …Its black sludge is threatening to smother every last living part of me.
The film might is based off of Warren Zanes’ excellent “Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.” Cooper is writing the screenplay, adapting Zanes’ tackling of Springsteen’s psyche during that time.
So it goes, one of the outtakes that emanated from the Nebraska bedroom sessions turned out to be a song called “Born in the USA.” A few years later, Springsteen would go on to re-record it, in a proper studio, with the E-Street Band, and the rest is the stuff of rock and roll history.
Cooper is coming off 2022’s Edgar Allen Poe film, “The Pale Blue Eye.” His other directing credits include “Crazy Heart,” “Black Mass,” “Hostiles,” and “Out of the Furnace.” A few years ago, Cooper admitted he was obsessively listening to “Nebraska” while writing ‘Furnace.’
“Deliver Me From Nowhere” will be released theatrically sometime in 2025.
