There is a compelling movie buried within "Deliver Me From Nowhere"--we see hints whenever Bruce Springsteen's family history becomes central.
Artists often do not transplant large sections of "life" from memory to the page. There isn't always a one-to-one correspondence between a real person and a literary character. (Efforts to insist on a one-to-one correspondence can become tiresome.) That said, an event from life can often "color" an artistic choice. When Springsteen writes "Nebraska," he is not writing in the voice of his own abusive father, but he *is* at least thinking about his abusive father:
They declared me unfit to live--
Said into the great void my soul'd be hurled.
They want to know why I did what I did.
Well, sir, I guess there's just a meanness in this world.
It's clear that the codependent relationship in "Badlands" (between the Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek characters) evokes Bruce's thoughts of the codependent relationship between his own parents.
It seems to me that Bruce's radical choice to empathize with his father then informs his career-defining work, "Born in the U.S.A." Free to write about complicated and even pathetic people, Springsteen creates one of the great characters in American literary history:
Born down in a dead man's town...
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground...
End up like a dog that's been beat too much...
'Til you spend half your life just coverin' up, now...
Scott Cooper is a gifted director, but whenever his gaze drifts from Bruce and his father, he loses steam. Bruce's girlfriend isn't quite three-dimensional. Her daughter is even less compelling. (Imagine what a writer like Kenneth Longergan might manage to create.) Jeremy Strong cannot add much, because he is given threadbare material. Meryl Streep's daughter--let's not even talk about her.
This is a C- and it's certainly skippable.
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