Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere | Film Review

Released October 24, 2025

The Boss with Better Hair

I just saw the movie Deliver Me From Nowhere starring Jeremy Allen White. I actually saw Jeremy earlier this year on March 18th, when I was living in the River North neighborhood in Chicago. It looked like he was in character and filming an episode of his hit TV show, The Bear, because he was wearing Carhartts and hurried past me with his head slumped over. I’m a slight 5’8”, so seeing one of Hollywood’s biggest rising stars an inch shorter than me was strangely reassuring. I was the only one who noticed him because both of us are these sneaky little characters.

Seven months later he’s playing Bruce Springsteen on an iMax screen with his wavy brunette hair colored dark brown. And yet, even with his brown contact lenses, tailored flannel shirts, and Jersey grumble, it still felt like Jeremy Allen White’s movie more than Springsteen’s. Bruce Springsteen's good looking, but Jeremy Allen White is strikingly handsome, like a male model. It was hard to sink into the movie and believe it was Bruce Springsteen. Bruce seems like a chatty guy, and Jeremy spends half the movie doing these silent, brooding poses showing off his tight abs.

That’s the paradox of the film: Jeremy Allen White is too gorgeous for the role, and too soulful to pass as a working class hero. You keep waiting for him to break into a cologne ad. But once you accept that, the film settles into something quietly appealing. It’s less of a rock opera and more of a creative coming-of-age story. There are flashes of magic, moments in the studio when the music starts to click and you can feel something happening, but the film keeps returning to this meditative stillness.

The film is the story of a young man growing up under the shadow of an alcoholic father and finding his voice through music. Jeremy Strong is the surprise here. After his shark-like turn as Donald Trump’s evil mentor Roy Cohn in The Apprentice, he shows up as a scruffy, kind-hearted producer with a pot belly and a soft voice. It’s lovely work that brings some realism to the movie. The funniest moment is when the super producer Jimmy Iovine, who produced Dr. Dre and Eminem, gets on the phone playing himself in 1982 and tells Jeremy Strong the album sucks.

Deliver Me From Nowhere is never loud or flashy, but it’s quietly rewarding. It’s about how some music gets made in solitude, and how making art can be an act of survival. And while Jeremy Allen White may not quite disappear into Bruce Springsteen, he makes you believe in the loneliness that created him.

It’s not a perfect film, especially the black and white flashbacks of a little kid who doesn’t look Bruce Springsteen or Jeremy Allen White. I mean, who was that kid? Was that the director’s son? 

But the romance between Jeremy and his single mother girlfriend Faye Romano portrayed by Odessa Young is electric. Their romance is the highlight of the film, mirroring Springsteen’s ambivalent relationship with his past and his inability to be authentic and vulnerable. The two of them capture that innocent intensity of young love.

By the end, Deliver Me From Nowhere feels less like a musical biopic and more like a visual poem about artistic loneliness.  It doesn’t explode — it exhales. But it’s a good exhale. The kind you want after a long week, with a bag of popcorn in a dark theater and the feeling that you might still make something beautiful out of your chaos.