When setting out to achieve lasting greatness, it’s best to be aware of your inspirations. Nothing has been new since the drawings in the cave, and remaining cognizant of your forbears, both their accomplishments that seem replicable, and idiosyncrasies that ought to be left alone, is a sturdy foundation from which to start. Even direct citation can work when done properly, as the filmographies of Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese will readily attest. The caveat, of course, is that you’d better come with the goods, especially when interpolating large swaths of beloved popular culture into your wider canvas. Legends have a way of staying large, making life in their looming shadow a lamentable proposition, and even worse when you’re working overtime to bolster the myth. Cutting off your nose to spite your face is one thing, and severing the whole damned head is another entirely. 

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’s first unenviable reference point is right there in the title, a clunky moniker that gives away the film’s made-for-tv stylings before we’ve even had a chance to notice them ourselves. Contending with the life and times of a musician as beloved as Bruce from the Meadowlands was always going to have some folks crying foul, and writer/director Scott Cooper seems determined to offend as little as possible. Cross cutting between the songsmith’s’ rocky 1950’s childhood and his 1980’s ascent to stardom, the movie’s truncated time frame may avoid the cradle-to-grave depiction that ties so many biopics into knots, but it’s just about the only way that Nowhere deviates from a trusted formula. Even with the focus on a specific chapter in his career, that being the writing, recording, and release of Bruce’s hallowed 1982 LP Nebraska, the whole thing unfolds with the rigid predictability of Swiss timekeeper. You might not know the particulars of a certain scene in advance, but their general arrangement, from the highs and lows, failed romances, and soaring moments of actualization, is as instinctive as your next breath.

That’s supposed to be where actors come in handy, supplying texture and nuance, even to a script as deathly unimaginative as Nowhere’s, but Jeremy Allen White is bringing baggage of his own. While true stans may have been with him since Shameless, the thespian only reached household fame by playing Carmen Berzatto on FX’s restaurant drama The Bear, and you can hardly blame him for playing the hits here. Ever receding and morose, White plays Springsteen as Carmy’s perfect kitchen counterpart, with mumbled dialogue, slumped shoulders, and sunken eyes that betray a reservoir of inner pain. Bruce’s struggles with depression, especially in the analogous real-life time span, are well documented, but for patrons of The Beef of Chicago, it can be hard to separate The Boss from the bruin. That SNL uncanny valley that ensnares most performers playing larger-than-life cultural figures is, for once, not a problem here; it’s impossible to overact when your impression is facing in the wrong direction.

His torments remain nebulous outside of a tempestuous relationship with his father (Stephen Graham), though at least daddy likes his cinema almost as much as his whiskey. In the pair’s lone moment of childhood bonding, pops takes his young charge to a matinee showing of Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, an American classic of paternal bad actors whose mere intonation is clearly meant to do some heavy thematic lifting. The 1955 film’s star, Robert Mitchum, is a canonical menace, abusing both religion and societal presumptions as a means to an end, a tough, multifaceted juxtaposition for Graham to weather. He tries his best, but Cooper’s brand of familial drama comes straight from the bargain bin, leaning on every crutch of regrettable-home-life storytelling without a zig or zag in sight. Worse still, the generic native traumas are the only ones Nowhere offers its centrifugal force, morphing from original wound into an all-encompassing engine of despondence. If Springsteen’s hurt was really this easy to locate, at least the film’s emotional climax, set in a therapist’s office, could let us sit uncomfortably in Bruce’s pain, but Cooper only envisions Allen’s tearful breakdown in terms of Oscar clips, fading to black as soon as we get the money shot.

Plotting needn’t be so nakedly strategic, a truth embodied by Terrance Malick’s Badlands, another movie whose clips are littered throughout Nowhere’s runtime. The 1973 classic, concerning a young couple who goes on the run after one lover displays a facility with murder, was top of mind when Springsteen was penning Nebraska, but gesturing toward the iconoclastic telling of the tale only highlights the labored yarn-spinning on display. Here, again, Cooper is butting heads against his own trepidacious impulses, lionizing a work of art that’s content with inference and subjectivity while having his own characters literally jot ‘why?’ down on a note pad so that we don’t miss a morsel of their hamfisted creative process. Malick may catch occasional flack for his tendency to ogle wheatfields when there’s weighty dramaturgy to contend with, but at least his paradigm allows for some air circulation. Cooper’s world is hermetically sealed.

Which would seemingly make him the perfect guiding hand when Nowhere decides to get into the technical weeds, but the film’s source text, a making-of novel written by Warren Zanes, surely provides a better medium for such long-winded minutiae. On screen, the endless back-and-forths about sonic fidelity and audio transfers will either fall on the deaf ears of the oblivious, or sound like entry level discussions to the initiated. Love & Mercy, Bill Pohlad’s wonderful, heartbreaking Brian Wilson biopic, showed that a jargon-heavy depiction of the recording process could make for proper cinema if you find a way into the artist’s head, but Cooper’s fundamentalist approach keeps us as locked out as Springsteen’s bandmates. The extra flare they provide is antithetical to Nebraska’s mission, an earnest argument for stripping things down to their rawest elements that likely worked better on the page. In motion, all we see is a guy who brought a bunch of well-intentioned friends by the studio only to be banished as he returns to his primordial, superior vision.

Harsh as that reading may be, Nowhere is careful not to chide its hero in any meaningful way. His romance with young mother Faye Romano (Odessa Young), a composite character of a few different women in Springsteen’s contemporaneous orbit, is disappointed with her paramour’s flighty aloofness, but not to the point of taking him to task. Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), his endlessly supportive manager, is loath to push back on his beneficiary’s stubbornness, instead laying his concerns at the feet of his poor wife (Grace Gummer), who silently listens while applying hand cream. Bruce himself, a purported poet-laureate of the common man, views his fellow earthlings with a sociologist’s remove, studying beleaguered blue-collar types from the safety of a diner booth without ever making their acquaintance. The irony of these songs, obsessed with spurring lower-class disobedience, coming from a man rich and powerful enough to never hear the word no, seems lost on Cooper, his condescension poorly cosplaying as empathy. 

At least he understands our ear for a good tune, peppering the soundtrack with the likes of Santana and The Allman Brothers, as well as a few of Bruce’s more radio-friendly hits. If you’ve learned anything by now, it’s that incorporating the winsome exploits of the past can make you seem small by comparison, prompting audiences to wish they were engaging with the real thing, and not some half-baked imposter. The tunes, when paired with Hunter, Badlands, The Bear, Nebraska, and Springsteen himself, only cause the mind to drift, longing for simple revisitation instead of a sloppy, often boring rejiggering. Nebraska, even with its carefully manifested sense of mystery, can speak for itself, which is an awful lot more than you can say of Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.