Most rock biopics - "Bohemian Rhapsody" (meh), "Rocketman" (just OK), "The Dirt" (good movie about the loathsome Mötley Crüe) or "Ray" or "What's Love Got To Do With It" (Ray Charles and Tina Turner, respectively, both brilliant) start with starving artists in one metaphorical, literal or chemical form of Palookaville or another and end with the stars, who have universally approved of the stories, riding off into the sunset in a welter of adulation, sales and superstardom.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is just the opposite, starting when Bruce Springsteen, after fifteen years as a starving artist, made it big at age 31, and tore his whole career, and life, back to its ugly, parlous roots - artistically and literally - to start over in many ways from the ground up.
But that's the movie. We'll come back to that.
First things first: I'm a Bruce Springsteen fan. And I'm a conservative.
And if I lose you there, fair enough; David or Beege have got something good up right about now, I'm sure. I'll be back to more predictable fare soon.
But yep. I'm a died in the wool Springsteen fanatic. My kids have instructions to play "This Hard Land" at my funeral, someday.
"But Mitch - Bruce is a limo liberal"
Yep. So I hear. And I don't care about musicians' politics any more than I do about Rand Paul's taste in music.
But it's true - after nearly two decades of eschewing overt displays of politics at the peak of his career, he cast his lot with the Democrats starting in 2004, and never looked back. His longtime guitar player "Miami" Steve Van Zandt pointed out the (ahem) price Bruce paid by coming out as a prog:
Is Springsteen, supposedly the ultimate heartland rocker, unable to play in certain places now? “Well, our audience is much less mixed than it was, politically. When Bruce got vocal behind the Democrats, we probably lost half the audience. There’s nowhere we can’t do business but some places, yeah, they feel a bit like enemy territory. We’re ten times bigger in Europe. We might play six stadiums in America and sixty in Europe.”
(Van Zandt, whose solo debut album is one of my five favorite records of all time, has lurched wildly between declaring his concert a "politics free zone" when I saw him in Minneapolis in 2018, to...a bit less circumspect as the Biden regime circled the drain).
Against that? There's a solid case to be made that Springsteen's "Born in the USA", notwithstanding the inevitable pointy-headed huffing and puffing about it being a song deeply. critical of America, helped Ronald Reagan win the 1984 election.
“Morning in America,” the title of a corny TV commercial, was often described as Reagan’s all-but-official reelection theme. Really it was “Born in the U.S.A.” There is only one upbeat line in it, but it’s the last one Springsteen sang: “I’m a cool rockin’ daddy in the U.S.A.” Despite everything he’s endured, the narrator is still rockin’, still cool. Even those who paid close attention to the lyrics of the accidental anthem could take from it this: Dark as things got in a previous era, this is a new generation. The draft is no more. We have shaken off the pall of Vietnam. We are back. We are Americans, and it’s time to shout it out loud again. We were born in the U.S.A.
Springsteen's been trying and failing to take that song back for four decades now.
And it's hardly alone; I once wrote a 12 part series on how Springsteen in his heyday - on Born in the USA, Tunnel of Love, Nebraska and especiallly his "Holy Trinity" (Born to Run, the River and my personal favorite, Darkness on the Edge of Town), may well have been a liberal, but still wrote America's best conservative music, which was why so many conservatives ignored his politics, effectively shutting him up and letting him sing on their own.
But years of Democrat politics, two decades of albums that wandered all over the musical map with widely varying results, and a very badly-advised stance in favor of ludicrously high ticket prices (so clubfooted that it even caused his fan magazine of 40 plus years to shut down) seem to have affected Sprinsteen's career shelf life. The movie is a box office flop after its opening weekend.
Which is a shame. Because it's a really solid, well, written, superbly acted film in which the point isn't that the stars made it - like all the different variations on A Star is Born featuring Queen, Elton John and the like - but how very close the star came to losing it all, their responsibility for it, and the hard, ugly road to redemption.
The normally excellent Armond White's review was - almost unthinkably for White - a train wreck. John Nolte loved it for most of the same reasons I do - and also very correctly pointed out why it's currently tanking:
To begin with, Deliver Me From Nowhere is not a jukebox musical. People know this is not a greatest hits biopic, and people want to hear the greatest hits. What’s more, the one album Nowhere does cover, 1982’s Nebraska, doesn’t have any hits. It’s a stripped-down, dark, and dreary folk album. Springsteen fans love Nebraska, which brings me to the next problem… The major one…
Bruce Springsteen has not been Bruce Springsteen for a long, long time. A massive part of his fan base was made up of the working class. The men who raced in the streets, worked in the factories, lived on the margins, counted the days till Friday and payday, and kept our world turning with their dirty hands and broken dreams…
Nolte's right - the movie focuses on the most obscure and, to the market, frustrating part of his career. It also happens to be the part that is an incredible story, worth telling. I personally don't need a movie that plays the hits - I have 'em all on record, and I can play them all on guitar and harmonica and often enough bass and organ. Lesser biopics may acknowledge the frailty, the warts and the hard splash of reality on the way to the big payoff. Deliver Me From Nowhere puts the tough stuff center stage.
I'd say it's worth a watch.
Or not, if politics is all that matters to you. It's your ticket money.
Me? I'm spinning Born to Run and smiling at the sky.
