Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere hasn’t been critically panned across the board, but enthusiasm has certainly been lacking. And now it’s tanking financially. I feel sorry for Bruce Springsteen, Jeremy Allen White, director Scott Cooper. They put their hearts and souls into this thing, and nobody’s digging it. I haven’t even seen the poor thing, for some reason.
Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro (posted Saturday morning): “If Springsteen hits the bottom of its tracking range at $9M, it won’t be ‘Glory Days’ for this net $55M Jeremy Allen White-Jeremy Strong starring production. On the upside, the movie has a 60% definite recommend on PostTrak, so we’ll see if this improves.
“Why isn’t this brand-name rock performer movie not being released over Christmas a la last year’s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown when a bigger audience is available? While older Springsteen fans showed up last night at 40% over 55 (the pic’s biggest demo) and 59% over 45, it was clearly not in bulk judging from the grosses. Also, Springsteen was largely female leaning movie at 52%. Women over 25 bought tickets at 46% and men over 25 went at 42%.
“Overall, this is very Caucasian-leaning movie at 85% with few diverse demos showing up. We’ll get into this more as the weekend goes on, but off the bat, the release date isn’t doing this making-of-the-Nebraska-album any favors.”
From Owen Gleiberman‘s “What’s the Problem with ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere’? The Problem Is That ‘Nebraska’ Is a Bore“:
“Jeremy Allen White doesn’t look very much like Springsteen. The lack of an acute resemblance isn’t fatal in a biopic, but it’s one of a number of things about Deliver Me from Nowhere that just feels…off.
“At home, when I’m making dinner with my daughters, we always play music, and mixed in with the new stuff I like to give them a dose of music history, so I’ll play everything from Nina Simone to Steely Dan to the Clash to ELO to Dylan to the Spinners to the Ramones. But the one time I put on “Nebraska,” we were four tracks into it when Sadie, who is 13, looked at me with a wince of pain and said, ‘Can we play something else?’
“She had never said that before, and I was amused to see her reaction directly echoed in the movie by the Columbia Records executive Al Teller (David Krumholtz), who hears a couple of minutes of the record and then says can you please take it off. It’s not just that the album ‘isn’t commercial.’ For many of us, there’s a punishing monotony to Nebraska.
“The album, in its way, is all about pain, and Deliver Me from Nowhere captures how creating the record all by himself in his New Jersey bedroom was therapy for Bruce. That’s a moderately interesting chapter in the larger Bruce saga, and when he actually goes to therapy, the film treats it as cataclysmic — as if millions of us haven’t been there, and as if he was the first rock celebrity who ever walked into a shrink’s office.”