Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is music to your ears

At a pivotal moment in Scott Cooper’s superior biopic, Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), longtime manager of Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White), quotes Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood (1952) to his troubled friend: “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.”

This is significant for two reasons. First, because Deliver Me from Nowhere concentrates, admirably, upon a single chapter in Springsteen’s life and career: the creation of his sixth album, the acoustic classic Nebraska (1982). Instead of chasing global conquest after the commercial triumph of The River (1980), the Boss turned in on himself, seeking a higher muse and confronting the demons of his past.

As Warren Zanes recounts in his eponymous 2023 account of the record’s gestation, Springsteen drew upon an eclectic range of sources, including Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) and Charles Starkweather’s killing spree; Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955); and O’Connor’s stories, which he said, “captured a certain part of the American character that I was interested in writing about”.

That involved coming to terms with his childhood in Freehold, New Jersey, and memories of his violent, alcoholic father Doug (Stephen Graham). The heart of the movie is Springsteen’s concept of home, place and the guilt he feels about escape.

In this sense, Nebraska was 25 years ahead of its time, capturing in songs like Atlantic City, Mansion on the Hill and State Trooper the blue-collar identity crisis that came to dominate the Obama and Trump eras. “I know who you are,” says a fan. “That makes one of us,” Springsteen replies. 

Second, the movie is a fond account of Landau’s brotherhood with and unshakeable faith in his friend. Though Odessa Young is very good as the movie’s lone composite character, Faye, a single mother working in a diner who dates the rock star, Deliver Me from Nowhere is really about American masculinity and its fault-lines. 

Landau stood by his friend’s insistence that the original home cassette – recorded at a rented house in Colts Neck on a Portastudio and an old Gibson Echoplex – should be the album’s master recording, not the rough basis for high-tech production in the studio (comedian Mark Maron plays Springsteen’s baffled but loyal engineer, Chuck Plotkin). Yet Landau also knew when his psychic disintegration had reached the point that he needed professional help. 

For many, Nebraska remains Springsteen’s masterpiece and Deliver Me from Nowhere is a nuanced, intelligent and absorbing account of a very particular cultural and personal moment in time.

Suggested Reading

What Springsteen knows that Trump doesn’t

Ian Winwood

STREAMING

Mr Scorsese (Apple TV+)

“Hollywood… I don’t belong there,” says Martin Scorsese in Rebecca Miller’s terrific five-part portrait. “I do what I do.” Though the 82-year-old director’s features are now carved on the Mount Rushmore of American cinema, his path to glory has not been linear and his furious artistic integrity has, more than once, exiled him from the mainstream entertainment industry.

It was, of all things, childhood asthma that led to his love of film. To ease the symptoms, his father would take him to the air-conditioned movie houses of lower Manhattan – where he would watch anything, for as long as he possibly could.

On television, he saw the classics of Italian neorealism: Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946); De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948); and Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960). Alongside movies, there was the influence of wise guys and mobsters. “Violence was imminent all the time,” he recalls. “We were in between ‘Murder Mile’ and ‘Devil’s Mile’.”

There was also the church, where the young Scorsese discovered serenity and ritual – and, he thought, his vocation. Preparatory seminary did not work out, however, and he ended up at NYU studying film. But faith and its dilemmas (he still considers himself a Christian) infuse all his movies from Mean Streets (1973) onwards.

“Are we intrinsically good or evil?” he says. “This is the struggle. Yeah, I struggle with it all the time.”

It was in Mean Streets that he also began his long partnership with Robert De Niro, which endures to this day: Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) was their tenth collaboration. And it was De Niro who visited Scorsese in hospital in 1978, after cocaine abuse had nearly cost him his life, and proposed the project that became Raging Bull (1980).

De Niro is among the dazzling array of interviewees that Miller assembles: Jodie Foster, Cate Blanchett, Steven Spielberg, Sharon Stone, Paul Schrader, Brian De Palma, Mick Jagger, Isabella Rossellini (the third of the director’s five wives), Margot Robbie, Thelma Schoonmaker (his longtime editor) and Daniel Day-Lewis. “If you want to go further, he will always encourage you to go further,” says Day-Lewis, who is also Miller’s husband. “Martin’s a cage-fighter. He’ll be the last one standing.”

Leonardo DiCaprio, whose work with Scorsese began with Gangs of New York (2002), is especially insightful about the space that he gives to his actors and the demands that accompany such freedom. The director is reciprocally gracious about the financial independence that DiCaprio’s stardom has conferred upon their movies together. For The Departed (2006), Scorsese finally won the elusive Oscar for Best Director. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) was his biggest hit to date and made him more publicly recognisable than he had ever expected to be. 

The cost of his obsessive character to his spouses and children, not to mention to his own health, has clearly been immense. But the series ends with touching scenes of Scorsese caring for his wife Helen Morris, to whom he has been married since 1999 and who lives with Advanced Parkinson’s. As the screenwriter Jay Cocks observes: “He learned that an artist can be selfish about his art – but doesn’t have to be selfish, necessarily, in his life.”

STREAMING

Task (Sky Atlantic/Now)

Brad Inglesby’s follow-up to the acclaimed 2021 drama Mare of Easttown was unexpectedly inspired by the “collision” plot structure of Michael Mann’s Heat (1995): the converging paths of a cop and a villain. But this seven-part crime series, set in suburban Philadelphia, is very different in tone to the legendary diner scene with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.

Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo, never better) is a paunchy, boozy FBI agent – and former priest – reduced to the recruitment circuit on campuses after the murder of his wife Susan by his mentally ill adopted son Ethan (Andrew Rusel). Short on senior staff, his boss Kathleen McGinty (Martha Plimpton) coaxes him back to the front line as head of a makeshift task force, investigating armed break-ins at drug houses run by the Dark Hearts biker gang.

With no time to vet a team, Tom must make do with those assigned to him: Anthony Grasso (Fabien Frankel), a Delaware County detective; state trooper Lizzie Stover (Alison Oliver); and Aleah Clinton (Thuso Mbedu), a Chester detective sergeant. Distrust hangs heavy in the air.

On the other side of the criminal divide, Robbie (Tom Pelphrey, superb), Cliff (Raúl Castillo), and Peaches (Owen Teague) make a raid that goes badly wrong, leaving Robbie with 12 kilos of fentanyl to move and a kidnapped child, Sam (Ben Doherty), to look after. The latter task is yet another responsibility for his niece Maeve (Emilia Jones), already taking care of Robbie’s children.

The world of the Dark Hearts is brutal but also governed by a code, with its own nexus of quasi-familial dynamics. The scenes featuring Robbie’s fellow gang members Jayson (Sam Keeley) and Perry (Jamie McShane) crackle with menace and the knowledge that death is always close at hand.

At home, Tom struggles to be a good father to his biological daughter Sara (Phoebe Fox) and her adoptive sister Emily (Silvia Dionicio) – who is weighing up whether or not to make a family statement in court to help Ethan avoid long-term incarceration. At work, he suspects that the task force’s investigation is being thwarted by an informant. But who?

Though this is a slow-burn drama, its pacing pays off in depth of characterisation and moral exploration. The moment when Tom finally confronts Robbie is certainly worth the wait. A fine successor to Mare and one that deserves, as Inglesby hopes, to be renewed.

BOOK

The Beatles Anthology Book: The 25^th Anniversary Edition (Chronicle Books)

It has been a great year for fans of the Fab Four. There was Ian Leslie’s best-selling John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs; Kevin Macdonald’s IMAX documentary One to One: John and Yoko; and Sam Mendes’s announcement of four separate biopics, starring Paul Mescal as McCartney, Harris Dickinson as Lennon, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr.

Now, in time for Christmas, here comes a rolling revival of the great Beatles Anthology project of 1995-2000, a multimedia retrospective, including many unreleased tracks and outtakes, that introduced a new generation to the band. On November 21, the music collections, restored and expanded, will be released on 12 vinyl LPs, eight CDs and digital formats. Five days later, the documentary series, restored and remastered with a new ninth episode, will begin streaming on Disney+.

To get the party started, we have the accompanying book, first published in 2000; an oral history of the group and their team that is the closest we shall ever get to a Beatles autobiography. This morning, I tracked down my well-thumbed original copy and reflected upon the longevity of the band and its impact: when The Beatles Anthology first hit the bookshops, 30 years had already passed since they broke up. A quarter century later, they still compel the global imagination. The long and winding road stretches on; gloriously so.