What Springsteen knows that Trump doesn’t

And watches the salesman stare at my old man’s hands

He’s tellin’ us all ‘bout the break he’d give us if he could but he just can’t

Well if I could I swear I know just what I’d do

As the forthcoming biopic Springsteen: Deliver From Nowhere hovers into view, not for the first time, Used Cars has made itself at home in my mind. Never mind that the people of the United States have been to the polls on the first Tuesday of November no fewer than 11 times since the song’s release, the lyric quoted above says as much about the country as any I can think of. 

It’s all there: money, status, an imbalance of power, and the pursuit of liberty via automotive means. Voiced by a young narrator, dreams (or nightmares) of violence are inescapable. 

Despite once being nicknamed “the singing cheeseburger” by Brits who have no ear for music, Springsteen seems like a good egg. In the days before Donald J. Trump appeared like a melted peach melba on a golden escalator, I would hazard a guess that he was one of a vanishingly small number of private citizens the country’s voters could imagine becoming president. As if character and motivation were qualifications enough, even now – heck, especially now – some of them remain taken with the idea. 

Really, though, the job for which Bruce Springsteen is best qualified is the one he currently holds. In swearing an Oath of Allegiance to himself, he has the vast power of putting to music whatever is on his mind. At a time when the divide between American self-image and its unforgiving reality is a yawning chasm, to imagine him constrained behind the Resolute desk is akin to listening to the buoyant choruses of his songs – Reason To Believe, say, or Better Days – without bothering with the meat of the verses. 

That a man who sees his country so clearly has been able to reach the highest office of musical popularity is itself remarkable enough. Notwithstanding the members of his audience who prefer vibes to the absorption of lyrics, the unflinching truth is there for anyone who cares to hear it. On these streets, darkness isn’t confined to the edge of town. 

Right from the start, Bruce Springsteen recognised that amid its vast expanse of possibility and wonder, America is a bare-knuckled country that will not hesitate to lay a beatdown on its own people. Don’t be fooled by the instinctive allegiance with the underdog, either; the characters populating the shop floor of his songs are complicated and, sometimes, dangerous. The trailer for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere features a song in which the serial killer Charles Starkweather is asked why he murdered 11 people. “Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world,” is the reply. 

Even when he’s selling 30 million albums, as he did with Born In The USA, trouble marbles the music. There are the blue-collar toilers who wear “trouble on their shirts”, the Vietnam vet who can’t catch a break, the soon to be unemployed foreman who warns  “these jobs are going, boys, and they ain’t coming back to your hometown”. 

Eleven years later, in 1995, the younger siblings and children of these characters had it worse still. “Families sleeping in their cars in the southwest,” he sings on The Ghost Of Tom Joad, “no home, no job, no peace, no rest.”

In large part, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere tells the story of his most remarkable album, Nebraska. Originally intended as a mere demo from which the all-conquering E Street Band could take their cues, instead, the record emerged in its embryonic form after the source material refused to submit to even modest adornments. Good. In declining to offer the listener a place to hide, in 1982, Nebraska became the first complete artistic indictment of America in the eighties. 

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In a contemporaneous review, Greil Marcus, Springsteen’s best critic, wrote that the album portrayed “a world of meaningless killings and state executions, a world in which honest work has been trivialised and honest goals reduced to a bet on the state lottery; a world where the rich live as a different species, so far above the aspirations of ordinary people as to seem like gods”. 

Described like this, Nebraska sounds less like an historical document than an op-ed from this morning’s paper. As one of the few mainstream rockers willing to criticise Trump publicly, I suppose it’s reassuring to see the resonance of Springsteen’s past keeping company with his ageing form on the frontline. That’s the thing about being an unelected leader of the free world: there are no term limits. 

Of course, there’s also no chance of enacting legislation to slow the progress of his country’s descent into darkness. With trouble at the door, instead, Bruce Springsteen and his characters take heart from family, from community, and from a refusal “to start dying little by little, piece by piece”. In priceless moments, they catch a smile from a woman in a supermarket “that blows this whole fucking place apart”. 

As is only right, they take pleasure from the greatest gift the American Republic ever bestowed upon the world, too. The song Open All Night features a narrator facing a long drive to his lover’s house at the end of a night shift. Gunning his engines across the flat expanse of northern New Jersey, an inarguable cry issues forth from the open road. 

“Hey ho rock and roll, deliver me from nowhere”.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is in cinemas from Friday