Film reviews: Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere | The Mastermind

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (12A) ★★★★★

The Mastermind (15) ★★★★

Charting a transitional phase in Bruce Springsteen’s career when he retreated from the breakthrough success of 1980’s The River to record Nebraska instead of what would later become Born in the USA, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is that rare thing: a mainstream biopic of a proper rock legend that feels in sync with its subject.

Starring The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White as the Boss and written and directed by Crazy Heart’s Scott Cooper, it’s a film that works like a good Springsteen song by embracing and interrogating American myths and archetypes to reveal something more truthful about the people struggling to live up to them, in this case Springsteen himself.

Kicking off with Springsteen returning to New Jersey to recuperate from the exhaustion and exposure of The River tour, Cooper’s film uses the making of Springsteen’s stripped-down, recorded-in-his-bedroom Nebraska album as a metaphor for the soon-to-be-superstar’s nascent exploration of his own mental health issues during one of the prolonged bouts of post-tour introspection when – as Springsteen’s sympathetic manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) puts it – “the quiet can get a little loud.”

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As it happens, that phrase also perfectly sums up the sound of Nebraska, an album on which the distortion and echo effects of the lo-fi recording match the tumult in Springsteen’s life as his undiagnosed depression starts reverberating around his head in ways he doesn’t know how to deal with outside of the songs he’s starting to scratch out with a notepad and an acoustic guitar.

Here Cooper falls back on a few biopic tropes by making judicious use of black-and-white flashbacks to layer in details of Springsteen’s complex relationship with his bully-of-a-father (Stephen Graham). But he unpicks his psychological issues in other ways too, with references to Terrence Malick’s Badlands, art-rock noise mongers Suicide, and a (fictional) subplot in which Bruce can’t quite commit to a young single mother (Odessa Young – excellent) despite the palpable chemistry between them.

Through it all White’s brooding intensity is just right for this darker side of Springsteen and his singing (augmented at times with the real Springsteen) is as raw as his performance. Like listening to the record, you feel like you’re there with him.

But Cooper doesn’t just revel in this rawness; he contextualises it within the grind of the music industry’s momentum-obsessed hunger for hits, cannily using the origins of Born in the USA (the film gives us a barnstorming version of it) to emphasise the value of artistic need over corporate greed. Without Nebraska, Springsteen might not have survived what came next.

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Following up her under-seen art-world drama Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt returns with The Mastermind, a heist movie about an art school drop-out (Josh O’Connor) whose bungled attempt to rob a gallery forces him to abandon his family and go on the run. Set in in Nixon’s America, circa 1970, Reichardt frames the story as a portrait of a feckless rebel who is not only without a cause, but has no interest in acquiring one. It’s an intriguing proposition, but while Reichardt’s films never give much away about their characters, O’Connor’s JB is almost too much of a blank canvas. Still, the forensic way Reichardt chronicles JB’s ineptitude is pretty funny.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere and The Mastermind are in cinemas from 24 October.

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