Who Knows the Boss?
by Sloane DiBari, Opinions Editor
Illustration by Madalyn New
I went with my parents to see Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere on opening night at a chain movie theater in a big-ass mall in Rockaway, New Jersey. God bless the Great Garden State, God bless urban sprawl, God bless our opulent shopping centers, God bless the innumerable paunchy guys in Devils gear and old Italian ladies (many of whom were also engaged in some kind of Devils Victory Ritual) who packed the IMAX theater to capacity, God bless Bruce Springsteen, and God bless America.
Though I was surrounded by the spirit of the red-blooded inhabitants of my home state, my skepticism for gimmicky rock biopics with sexy Millennial–Gen Z cusper leads got the better of me. For a film about a man grappling with both the implications of fame and his turbulent childhood, Deliver Me from Nowhere lacks the edge one might expect and desire. Cooper’s only notable directorial trick is cutting back and forth between scenes showcasing Springsteen’s (played by Jeremy Allen White) unstable upbringing in Freehold, New Jersey and his months-long mental breakdown that occurred during the recording of his 1982 album Nebraska in nearby Colts Neck. Those boyhood vignettes are easily the most emotionally resonant parts of the film, to the extent that they almost redeem the flatness of the rest of the movie.
Nevertheless, every time that the adult Springsteen’s emotional struggle reaches a breaking point, the impact is negated by Cooper’s cheap technique of having Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) explain Springsteen’s mental state to the record execs, and by extension, the audience. Cooper had the opportunity to make a gut-wrenching drama about one of America’s greatest rockers recording his rawest and most alienating work to date, but instead, he chose to make another lame A Complete Unknown-esque movie whose relentless desire for mass appeal totally neuters it, and, even worse, assumes that the audience is too stupid to understand a straightforward Hollywood biopic.
Or at least that’s what I was thinking in that corny IMAX theater, anyway. But my dad, who’s probably the truest Bruce Springsteen fan in the world, loved the film.
Tom DiBari is kind of a quintessential Jersey guy. Despite having spent no more than six months of his conscious life living in Brooklyn, he, like many Italian Americans in Jersey who have even the loosest connection to the borough, is insistent upon the “Brooklyn in him.” He was born in Bensonhurst, and moved to Staten Island as a little kid before settling in Middletown, New Jersey in middle school. Middletown is in Monmouth County, the New Jersey-est part of New Jersey; it’s both close-ish to NYC and home to some of our most iconic beach towns, Springsteen’s home turf of Asbury Park included. Italian Americans abound. People determine where other people are from by asking them their town’s Parkway exit. The county seat is Freehold: the hometown of the patron saint of New Jersey himself.
My dad was first introduced to Springsteen when he moved to Middletown in 1978, when Springsteen’s popularity was still confined within New Jersey’s borders. Unlike my mom, who moved to my hometown from Iowa that same year, my dad got the Boss’s appeal immediately. “I liked the storytelling,” he said. “I could appreciate even then that there was a thread that ran through all of his albums. It wasn’t just a collection of songs.”
My dad’s relationship with Springsteen got more personal in his teenage years. He could relate to Springsteen’s complicated relationship with his father and his tales of coming of age in Freehold. He’s never had much more than that to say to me on the matter, but I can extrapolate based on the fact that the only XM radio station I’ve ever seen him tune into in the car (besides Fantasy Football Radio) is E Street Radio, and he almost always discusses any emotions unrelated to dogs (real and fictional) in relation to Bruce Springsteen.
He’s not just a fan—my dad gets the Boss. When Springsteen was living in Colts Neck during the Nebraska era and my dad was a Catholic high school student in Middletown, they worked out at the same gym in Red Bank. “I’d see [Springsteen] all the time,” he said. “He asked me to spot him once.”
“The coolest part was, on the weights back in the old days, there was an L-shaped bar that you used to lock the collar on so the weights wouldn’t fall off,” he said. “The first time I saw him there, ‘Roxanne’ by The Police came on, and he had two of those metal L-bars and was drumming it on the barbell. It was really cool.”
When I asked him if he ever behaved like a fanboy in the gym, he replied, “You know what? The thing is, you didn’t act like that around him.” My dad never even told the Boss his name. They were just two guys pumping iron in a little commuter town in Jersey.
I guess what I’m saying is: what the hell do I know? I’m just a snot-nosed Oberlin student who declared a Cinema & Media major for about two seconds in a very dark period in her early college career. If you really want to know if you should see Deliver Me from Nowhere, toss the Grape aside, delete your stupid Letterboxd account forever, and go talk to the guy who was weightlifting alongside the Boss in the Nebraska days. I asked my dad what he would tell someone who isn’t sold on the Springsteen movie; I think he and I had very different ideas on why someone wouldn’t like it. Still, I’ll leave you with his advice:
“You can’t go into it thinking you’re gonna get this big rock and roll experience, because that’s not what Nebraska is. It was a departure. Even back then, you knew, it’s kinda weird but really good.”
