The Real Reason Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA Made the Cut for Deliver Me From Nowhere
Jeremy Allen White bares a raw, vulnerable edge in Deliver Me From Nowhere, the Bruce Springsteen biopic that slices through a crowded field of music dramas with a powerfully moving punch.
Here comes another music biopic, but this one is more than the usual tour of hits. 'Deliver Me From Nowhere' puts Jeremy Allen White in Bruce Springsteen's boots and stares straight at the messy, vulnerable stretch right before everything explodes. It plays intimate and then abruptly loud, the way real life feels when fame is knocking and you still have to live with yourself.
The movie says it is about 'Nebraska'... and then breaks its own rule
The soundtrack leans hard on Springsteen's stark 1982 album 'Nebraska'—until it deliberately veers into 'Born in the U.S.A.' territory. Yes, the 1984 stadium-shaker that turned Bruce into a global phenomenon shows up here in a big way. Before you cry foul: the song actually started life during the 'Nebraska' period and got set aside for creative reasons. The film uses that wrinkle as a door to a full-on origin story, not just a cameo.
Back to April 1982: Power Station, lightning in a bottle
Director Scott Cooper doesn’t just nod at the early version of 'Born in the U.S.A.'—he reconstructs the moment. The movie re-creates the session at New York’s Power Station in April 1982, staging it at BerkleeNYC’s Power Station and dialing in the look, the room, the mood—everything. It is an unusually granular choice for a biopic, and it pays off because the film treats that take as the flashpoint for what came next.
"Bruce said to me, it’s the only time in 50 years that they felt like, 'My God, we just caught lightning in a bottle.'"
That is Cooper, to USA Today, explaining why the sequence gets so much oxygen. When a guy like Springsteen describes a moment that way, you get why a movie would bend its own rules to show it.
What 'Born in the U.S.A.' actually says (and why people keep getting it wrong)
The song’s history tangles with director Paul Schrader and his film 'Light of Day,' but the headline is the song itself. Despite the crowd-pleasing chorus, 'Born in the U.S.A.' is not a chest-thumping patriotic anthem. It is the opposite: a blunt story about a Vietnam veteran who comes home to a country that shrugs him off. The bright, booming arrangement masks a grim lyric about disillusionment, bad options, and a system that does not care. The movie leans into that dissonance.
White as Springsteen, and the tug-of-war before liftoff
Jeremy Allen White plays Bruce with a kind of rawness we haven’t seen from him before—quiet, inward, then suddenly jarring. The film keeps toggling between private doubts and high-voltage moments as he edges toward the version of himself the world would soon know. If you are here for a greatest-hits parade, this isn’t that. If you want to feel the pressure cooker in real time, it is.
- Director: Scott Cooper
- Screenplay: Scott Cooper
- Based on: 'Deliver Me from Nowhere' by Warren Zanes
- Cast: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham, Odessa Young
- Runtime: 119 minutes
- Budget: $55 million
- Box office: $850,000 (Thursday night previews only)
- Rotten Tomatoes: 61%
- IMDb: 6.7
'Deliver Me From Nowhere' is now in theaters worldwide.
Which Jeremy Allen White performance of a Springsteen song hit you the hardest in the movie? I have my pick, but I want to hear yours.