What’s it about?
The true story of how a young Bruce Springsteen – on the cusp of becoming the rock star we know today – risked alienating fans and his record label by writing an album that was nothing like his previous recordings.
What did we think?
Stephen Scott says: They say Bruce Springsteen went to a very dark place to create his greatest album, Nebraska. ‘They’ being the greek chorus of this movie, Bruce’s manager Jon Landau.
“Bruce is really depressed,” Landau tells his wife, “Bruce is going somewhere dark,” he tells her in a separate conversation, and “these aren’t real quotes from the movie, but they’re the best the reviewer could recollect from the blur of boredom he experienced, and it’s just to illustrate my principle role in this movie: telling the audience that Bruce is depressed,” Landau mumbles in a list of darkly poignant and (un)memorable lines.
From the start of this broody exposé on the creation of the album before Born In The USA, we see Bruce gazing broodingly at places. Broodingly reminiscing of his troubled childhood. Broodingly chatting up a groupie.
Dark and brooding gets dull after a while. It’s also the norm. Is dark and brooding a sign he’s happy? We don’t know. At no point do we get to see Bruce happy enough to make up our own minds that he’s depressed. We’re told he’s depressed.
The performances are fantastic. The music is fantastic. Sadly, the “tell, don’t show” script makes what is possibly a fascinating story into a dull as dishwater snoozefest. 3/10
Anthony Sherratt says: I have never been simultaneously interested and bored before so this biopic at least had something unique. I didn’t know a lot about early Bruce Springsteen so I was fascinated by his compulsion to write an album (Nebraska) so different from what he had been producing until that point. Comparisons to the manic behavior of Brian Wilson and other musicians are hard to avoid and it was amazing to see an artist coming to terms with what he envisioned not meeting the reality of output. It should have been an incredible experience.
Instead, it’s told in a ham-fisted and frankly boring manner where director Scott Cooper rams exposition down your throat at the expense of… well, pretty much everything else. In the ultimate failure to show-not-tell, Cooper has heavy handed dialogue that unnecessarily has a commentary running through what was already fascinating content, detracting from what should have been a must-watch story. What we end up with is two hours of angsty waffle including moments where they don’t even try to be subtle and just have the manager and his wife just fanboy analyse the anger and repression in the tapes he’s supposedly only just listened to.
I have to admit that Jeremey Allen White and Odessa Young put in great turns but they’re largely lost in a piece that merely made me want to learn everything about early Springsteen instead of actually teaching me about him. It turns out there are other documentaries about the album Nebraska and the Boss’s drive for it to become a reality. Heck, even the Wikipedia entries were more informative than this cliche-driven, hackneyed film that lost its identity along the way.
It’s a bizarre example of how to tell a really interesting story in a truly tedious way. There’s enough for Springsteen fans here but this really should have been so much more given what actually happened in real life. 4/10
