Film Reviews: Deliver Me from Nowhere is a flawed but engaging Springsteen biopic
Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen
- Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
- ★★★★☆
- Cinematic release
Tramps like us, as Bruce Springsteen famously declared, are born to run, but even the fleetest can’t outrun themselves.
stars Jeremy Allen White as The Boss, who is riding high on the success of the albums Born to Run and The River as the movie opens with a bravura live performance that showcases the band’s credentials.
But with superstardom beckoning, Springsteen retreats to the quiet bolthole of Colt’s Neck, New Jersey, bunkering in with an acoustic guitar and a four-track recording machine.
In flight from the prospect of a success he can’t control, with the black dog of depression nipping at this heels, Springsteen strips his creative process back to basics, producing a series of bleak, gloomy songs of desperation and desolation — much to the dismay of his manager, Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong).
Adapted from Warren Zanes’s book of the same name and directed by Scott Cooper, the movie doesn’t attempt to encapsulate Springsteen’s career.
Instead, we get a very particular period, the year in which Springsteen wrote and recorded (and tried and failed to re-record with the E Street Band) the songs that were eventually released as the Nebraska album, arguably Springsteen’s finest collection and certainly his most intimate.
Jeremy Allen White delivers a fine physical approximation of the young Springsteen, but the performance also brilliantly captures the artist’s restless energy, the guilt at leaving behind his blue-collar roots, the pain of a traumatising childhood, and the agony of excavating the songs and exorcising the darkness within.
White gets strong support from Jeremy Strong as Bruce’s dour but dedicated manager, and Odessa Young as Faye, the love interest who tries to connect with Springsteen during his self-torturing spiral, but Stephen Graham’s undoubted talent is a little wasted in a one-note characterisation of Springsteen’s violent father Douglas.
- The Mastermind
- ★★★★☆
- Cinematic release
Inspired by a real-life art heist in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1972,
stars Josh O’Connor as JB Mooney, a twentysomething art school dropout with a young family who is still leaching off his parents, Sarah (Hope Davis) and William (Bill Camp).
Too lazy and/or self-regarding to get an actual job, Mooney hatches a plan to steal a handful of canvases from a small-town museum; almost inevitably, the scheme immediately goes south, and Mooney — the son of a judge — finds himself on the run.
Written and directed by Kelly Reichardt, The Mastermind is a gloriously lo-fi homage to 1970s heist flicks, all bleached-out colours and an intoxicating jazz score by Rob Mazurek, whose off-kilter noodling emphasises the freewheeling nature of Mooney’s doomed endeavours.
Regular references to the ongoing Vietnam War suggest that Reichardt is situating Mooney’s relatively minor immorality in a landscape permeated by post-Watergate cynicism, and a dishevelled Josh O’Connor is terrific as the seedy, scheming scion of an ostensibly respectable middle-class America.
- The Spin
- ★★★☆☆
- Cinematic release
stars Brenock O’Connor and Owen Colgan as Dermot and Elvis, life-long friends and sparring partners who are running their Omagh record store into the ground.
With their landlady Sadie (Tara Lynne O’Neill) scheming to sell the shop to a property developer, the pair leap at the life-changing opportunity to buy a vinyl rarity being sold for peanuts in Cork.
Written by Colin Broderick and Mark McCausland, and directed by Michael Head, The Spin is a very Irish road-trip movie that takes the scenic route along back roads and boreens, with Dermot and Elvis encountering farmers, nuns, and strippers as they bicker their way south in their clapped-out car.
It’s a charmingly ramshackle affair of off-beat humour and non sequiturs (much of the back-and-forth between the friends feels ad-libbed), with O’Connor and Colgan terrific comic value as the bantering duo.
Tara Lynne O’Neill, vamping it up as a seductress baffled by her inability to woo every man she meets, steals every scene she’s in.
