Jeremy Allen White Is Bruce Springsteen

1, 2, 3, 4! As the second half of the year approaches, and awards season begins to appear on the horizon, it is – once again – music biopic time. And this year it’s the turn of Bruce Springsteen, the legendary New Jersey rock icon, who’s getting the big-screen treatment in a film now titled Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (it previously didn’t have his name on there), from Crazy Heart director Scott Cooper. The daunting task of stepping into the shoes of The Boss – the Big Man, Bad Scooter – goes to The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White, putting the tortured masculinity he perfects in that show to good exploit, documenting a particularly tumultuous period of Springsteen’s life. Take a look at the trailer here:

Now, for the most part, the trailer here illuminates the imaginative period that Deliver Me From Nowhere is set to explore: the creation of Springsteen’s hugely acclaimed album Nebraska, a meager set of acoustic songs that preceded the world-dominating pop bombast of Born In The USA. Famously lo-fi, it saw Bruce go solo, away from the E Street Band, facing a bout of depression as his previous album, The River, pushed him further into the limelight. We see Bruce recording in a hotel room with his recording engineer Mike Batlan (played by Paul Walter Hauser), hear the plaintive harmonica strains of Nebraska’s opening title track, and see some black-and-white flashbacks to his childhood, raised by his tough-man father (Stephen Graham).

But if the film looks set to step away from the typical Springsteen biopic route, there is some full E Street rockin’ stuff before the trailer is through, too – with Bruce and his pals blasting out ‘Born To Run’ on stage at Madison Square Garden (visibly similar to the ’79 ‘No Nukes’ concert). We see, too, the Jersey shore, lots of plaid shirts, a fair bit of studio footage, and some glimpses of Jeremy Strong as Springsteen’s longterm producer Jon Landau (no, not James Cameron’s Jon Landau).

Can Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere be a Nebraska movie, and still a straight-up Boss-fest too? Will it serve purists and casual fans alike? And are shiny trophies in the offing? We’ll find out when it hits UK cinemas on 24 October.