Most music biopics take place in a world of alternative facts where Queen broke up before Live Aid, Elton John named himself after John Lennon, Mötley Crüe‘s Vince Neil sang Billy Squier’s “My Kind of Lover” before it was released, Amy Winehouse didn’t thank “Blake Incarcerated” at the Grammys, and Bob Dylan hooked up with Joan Baez the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis. These movies stretched the truth so thin that “Weird Al” Yankovic was inspired to make a glorious film about his life that was 100 percent factually inaccurate, culminating in a scene where (spoiler alert!) he’s gunned down at the 1985 Grammys by a hitman working for Madonna.
Every once in a while, however, a movie comes along that sticks shockingly close to the truth. It happened in 2014 with the Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy, even though the timeline was occasionally massaged a bit, and it’s happened again with the upcoming movie Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.
Much like Love & Mercy, Deliver Me From Nowhere makes no attempt to tell the entire story of a great artist’s life. It instead focuses squarely on the narrow window of time between 1981 and 1982 when Springsteen recorded his lo-fi masterpiece Nebraska, convinced his label to release it without modifications, and struggled with depression and his inability to connect with a romantic partner. Along the way, it flashes back to the Fifties and Springsteen’s difficult relationship with his father.
We normally focus on factual errors when music biopics roll out, but we’re taking a different course this time since this one got all the big things right, and only cheated around the margins, most notably with the creation of a composite character. It should be noted that Springsteen was involved in this movie from the very beginning, and was present on set for much of the filming. He clearly helped them make most everything in the film accurate to his life and experiences. (This article is packed with spoilers, so we encourage you to only read after you’ve seen the movie.)
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Did an adolescent Bruce really have to walk into bars and collect his father, at the urging of his mother?
Yes. The movie begins in the 1950s with Springsteen’s mother, Adele (Gabby Hoffman), driving a young Bruce (Matthew Anthony Pellicano) up to a dingy bar and asking him to go inside. “Daddy,” he says. “Mom said it’s time to go home.” This might seem like a Hollywood flourish, but it’s taken straight from the script of Bruce on Broadway, the star’s successful one-man show that premiered in 2017.
“This both thrilled and terrified me,” Springsteen told the crowd every night. “It thrilled me because I had been given the license by my mother, the law, to go into the bar! I’m a kid! But it terrified me because to enter the bar is to enter my father’s privileged, private, and sacred space. He was not to be disturbed when he’s down at the bar. Everybody knew that… I would stand there lost in the noise and the hustle of the crowd and I would drink in that dim smell of beer and booze and aftershave. Now, to a kid, that was the scent of adulthood. It was the scent of manhood. I wanted some of that.”
Did the Nebraska sessions start right after the tour for The River wrapped up in Cincinnati, Ohio?
Yes. The movie jumps from young Bruce at the bar right to the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati on Sept. 14, 1981. As the film correctly states, this was the last stop of the River tour. It’s our first glimpse of Jeremy Allen White as adult Springsteen, and he’s playing “Born to Run” with the E Street Band. This was indeed one of the last songs of the set, though he closed out with “Quarter to Three” and the “Detroit Medley.” In a dressing room, a winded Bruce is met by manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) and given the keys to a rental house in Colt’s Neck, New Jersey, where he’ll record Nebraska.
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In real life, Springsteen first went to Honolulu, Hawaii, to serve as the best man at saxophonist Clarence Clemons’ wedding. The full E Street Band played at the reception. We can forgive Deliver Me From Nowhere for not mentioning this, since it has nothing to do with the Nebraska narrative. Also, it would have meant giving Clemons a speaking role in the film. Actor Judah Sealy looks very much like Clemons circa 1981, but no member of the E Street Band says a single word in this movie. This wasn’t done out of cruelty. The movie is just simply not their story.
Did Springsteen actually play unannounced shows at the Stone Pony throughout 1982?
Yes. Springsteen had a lot of free time on his hands throughout 1982, and he often hung out at the Stone Pony and other bars throughout New Jersey, like Big Men’s West or Royal North Manor. It didn’t take much to coax him onto the stage with whoever happened to be playing in Asbury Park. In May of that year, he began a Sunday night tradition of jamming with Stone Pony house band Cats on a Smooth Surface, led by guitarist Bobby Bandiera, that carried on through October.
In Deliver Me From Nowhere, we see Springsteen performing “Lucille” at the Pony before he even starts creating Nebraska. To be a stickler, he started recording the album in December 1981, and the Cats on a Smooth Surface residency didn’t start until May 1982. But “Lucille” was indeed in their live repertoire. (As long as we’re being sticklers, their portrayal of Bandiera as a long-haired, Bob Seger-like wild man is a bit off-model compared to the real guy.)
Did he meet the little sister of a former high school classmate outside the Pony and began a relationship with her?
No. A major plot point of Deliver Me From Nowhere is Springsteen’s relationship with a young single mother named Faye Romano, played by Odessa Young. This is a composite character based on several girlfriends Springsteen had during this period. Model/actress Joyce Hyser isn’t mentioned in the movie, but she was with him from 1978 through 1982. When they split, he had a series of short-term relationships. In his 2016 memoir, Born to Run, he refers only to a “lovely 20-year-old girlfriend” from this time. Hyser was 25 years old in 1982, so he’s presumably referring to someone else that he didn’t want to make a character in the film for understandable reasons.
Did Springsteen struggle to connect with women around the time of Nebraska?
Yes. In Born to Run, Springsteen writes bluntly about the trouble he had maintaining relationships with women. “Two years inside of any relationship and it would simply stop,” he wrote. “As soon as I got close to exploring my frailties, I was gone. You were gone. One pull of the pin, it’d be over and I’d be down the road, tucking another sad ending in my pack. It was rarely the women themselves I was trying to get away from. I had many lovely girlfriends I cared for and who really cared for me. It was what they triggered, the emotional exposure, the implications of a life of commitments and family burdens… With the end of each affair, I’d feel a sad relief from the suffocating claustrophobia love had brought me.”
Did a young Springsteen attack his father with a baseball bat to protect his mother?
Yes. In one of the most harrowing scenes in the movie, a drunken Douglas Springsteen cajoles a young Bruce into a bedroom slapping game that begins to border on genuine physical abuse. (It’s unclear if this ever happened.) He then sneaks up behind his father during a vicious argument with his mother and smacks him in the back with a baseball bat.
According to Born to Run, this actually happened. “They were standing in the kitchen, my father’s back to me, my mother inches away from his face while he was yelling at the top of his lungs,” Springsteen wrote. “I shouted at him to stop. Then I let him have it square between his broad shoulders, a sick thud, and everything grew quiet. He turned, his face barroom red; the moment lengthened, then he started laughing. The argument stopped; it became one of his favorite stories and he’d always tell me, ‘Don’t let anybody hurt your mom.’” This is the exact line that Douglas says to Bruce in the movie.
Did Terrence Malick’s Badlands really inspire Springsteen to write the Nebraska title track?
Yes. Once movie Bruce settles into his Colt’s Neck home, he flips through the channels and comes across an hilariously Eighties exercise class, The Price Is Right, a split-second of original VJ Mark Goodman on MTV, and then a broadcast of the 1973 Terrence Malick film Badlands. The movie is a fictionalized account of real-life serial killer Charles Starkweather and his teenage accomplice, Caril Ann Fugate. This captures Springsteen’s attention, and we later see him reading a book about the murders, and even scrolling through archival newspaper accounts on microfiche at the library. He begins writing a song called “Starkweather” that he eventually retitles “Nebraska,” shifting it from third person to first person. This is exactly how it all went down.
Did he record Nebraska on a four-track tape recorder in a bedroom?
Yes. In the movie, Paul Walter Hauser portrays Springsteen’s guitar tech Mike Batlan, who sets him up with a four-track TEAC Tascam Series 144 tape recorder in a bedroom of the Colt’s Neck property. They run the tape through a Gibson guitar echo unit to give it reverb. Despite his limited recording knowledge, Batlan sets this all up himself, and records Springsteen while sitting on a bed. It’s presented in the movie exactly how it happened, though the real Batlan was considerably slimmer than the actor playing him. (Later, in 1987, Batlan and fellow guitar tech Douglas Sutphin sued Springsteen for unpaid overtime, unlawful fines, and emotional distress. The case dragged on for years before they finally settled out of court in 1991. In more recent years, Batlan fell on some hard times.)
Did Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader really give Springsteen the idea to call a song “Born in the U.S.A.”?
Yes. In 1981, screenwriter Paul Schrader had the idea for a movie about two brothers playing in a bar band; he called it Born in the U.S.A. He passed the script onto Jon Landau in the hopes that Springsteen would play one of the lead roles. Springsteen had little interest in an acting career, but he did like the title enough to use it for an in-progress song he’d been calling “Vietnam.” The movie presents this the way it happened.
It doesn’t mention that Schrader eventually had to rename the movie since people would presume he took the title from Springsteen, as opposed to the other way around. It came out in 1987 as Light of Day, with Michael J. Fox and Joan Jett in the lead roles. Springsteen contributed a song of that name to the movie soundtrack, and it’s a part of his live repertoire to this day. Schrader has no hard feelings about Bruce taking his title, and even attended the premiere of Deliver Me From Nowhere.
Did the E Street Band attempt to record the Nebraska songs?
Yes. Springsteen briefly forgot about this when he spoke to Rolling Stone earlier this year, but he did attempt to record many of these songs with the E Street Band; those “electric Nebraska” versions were then put aside for decades, growing to mythic status for many fans, before being released this fall as part of a new box set. The film shows how it all went down. “We’re losing everything I like about the demo tape,” movie Bruce tells Landau and his engineers after trying the full-band arrangements. “This [demo tape] has something. It’s got the atmosphere, rawness, the right kind of echo. This just doesn’t have it. The band is overpowering the material and we’re losing what makes it special. We gotta strip it down, let it breathe.”
Did Springsteen record many of the Born in the U.S.A. songs at the same time as Nebraska?
Yes. In a moment of great frustration, movie Bruce takes Landau outside of the recording studio and vents that the sessions aren’t working. “We’ve got an incredible take on ‘Cover Me,’ which thankfully we didn’t give to Donna Summer,” says movie Landau. “We have ‘Glory Days,’ ‘I’m Going Down,’ and a knockout ‘I’m on Fire.’ Don’t forget you’ve got ‘Born in the U.S.A. Did I tell you what [producer Jimmy Iovine] said about ‘Born in the U.S.A.?’ He was blown away. He said the album is done. It can be ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and 10 other tracks and nobody would care. He said with that song leading, nothing else matters.” Springsteen did indeed have all these songs at this point, and “Cover Me” was indeed initially written for Donna Summer. (Notice now movie Landau didn’t mention “Dancing in the Dark.” That one wasn’t written until 1984.)
Did Springsteen’s father get arrested and then disappear for three days in Los Angeles?
Yes. Midway through the movie, Springsteen’s mother calls him in a panicked state. “He’s lost somewhere in Los Angeles,” she says. “We can’t find him. It’s been three days. He was arrested out in the desert over a traffic ticket. They took him down to the county jail. The last thing I heard, they let him out. He was in an alley in Chinatown. Can you come find him?” Springsteen describes this exact situation in his book, but it’s unclear when it happened, and it’s quite likely the film moved it to 1982 so Springsteen could have a scene with his father as an adult.
Did Douglas Springsteen suffer from mental health problems?
Yes. For many years, Bruce made it seem like his struggles to connect with his father were largely a result of an immense generation gap. It was only after Douglas Springsteen died in 1998 that Bruce slowly began to reveal that his father suffered from a deep mental illness. Things finally changed in the last decade of his life. “Modern pharmacological medicine gave my father 10 extra years of life and a peace he might never have had,” Springsteen wrote in Born to Run. “He and my mother got to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. He got to know his grandchildren and we became much closer. He became easier to reach, to know and love. I’d always heard my father in his youth described as ‘full of the devil,’ ‘rakish,’ ‘full of fun,’ as someone who loved to dance. I had never seen it. I only saw the lonely brooding man, always on edge, disappointed, never at home or at rest. But in the last years of his life, his softness came to the fore.”
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Did Springsteen and buddy Matt Delia drive cross-country in 1982 and move Bruce to L.A.?
Yes. Springsteen’s lifelong buddy Steve Van Zandt is a mute presence in the movie, and it’s easy to miss his scenes if you blink. But a lot of screen time is given to Springsteen’s childhood friend Matt Delia, portrayed by Australian actor Harrison Sloan Gilbertson. When Nebraska was done, they packed up a ’69 Ford XL and moved Bruce out to Los Angeles, where he’d remain for much of the next decade.
Somewhere along the way, they stop at a county fair, where Springsteen is overcome with emotion and nearly loses consciousness. This seems like a screenwriter’s fantasy, but Springsteen describes the moment in his book. “A despair overcomes me,” Springsteen writes. “I feel an envy of these men and women and their late-summer ritual, the small pleasures that bind them and this town together. Now, for all I know, these folks may hate this one-dog dump and each other’s guts and be screwing one another’s husbands and wives like rabbits. Why wouldn’t they? But right now, all I can think of is that I want to be amongst them, of them, and I know I can’t. I can only watch.”
