What’s it about?

Bruce Springsteen was riding a wave of popularity set to make him a global superstar, but his troubled mind was hell-bent on sending his music in a different direction.

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.