Have I listened to very much Bruce Springsteen? Besides his most classic songs, not really. So a movie about the making of his album Nebraska wasn’t very high on the list of things I would want to see in a movie theater. I know The Boss is a cultural icon and a favorite of plenty of people out there. After watching the movie about the making of the album, I can’t say that the movie did very much justice to the story or the album. It stars Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen and places the audience in the middle of his successful beginnings as an artist. It opens on a thundering performance of “Born To Run” and then brings Bruce to the making of his next album.

Along the way, we’re introduced to Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), Bruce’s manager and prime confidante. He is there to facilitate Bruce on his way to crafting his new album and also make sure that the record company is okay with what’s going on. Bruce is such a star at this point that he really has a long rope with the record company. But as the movie goes on, there are some demands of his for the album that push executive Al Teller (David Krumholtz) to the edge.

Bruce retreats to his small-town hometown in New Jersey and gets entangled with the locals playingon Friday nights with a band at the biggest music bar. He’s introduced to Faye Romano (Odessa Young), and a relationship blossoms. There really isn’t an antagonist in the classic sense of the word here, but it’s part Bruce’s own depression, his upbringing with an abusive father (played by Stephen Graham), and the weight of stardom. Also on the cast are Gaby Hoffmann (playing his mom), Marc Maron (playing recording manager Chuck Plotkin), and Paul Walter Hauser (playing Mike Batlan, but really the embodiment of the audience).

For fans of Bruce Springsteen, this might be a dream. LIke I said before, I don’t have parents that blasted Bruce Springsteen to me at an early age. I know that “Born In The USA’ is the most misunderstood song in the history of music, and that’s really about it for my experience with The Boss. For me, the person who doesn’t really have any connection to the material, my eyes started glazing over about halfway through the movie.

The drama unfolding onscreen is fine, its easy to see that Bruce is a tortured artist that’s in the pangs of depression about a variety of things in his life. That doesn’t excuse a lot of the drama and conflict in the film not actually unfolding. We don’t get a resolution with Faye’s story. His acceptance of his father and the abusive tendencies is also undersold and undercooked. The movie also REALLY wants you to know that everyone thought it was a bad idea for Bruce to release an acoustic, folksy album that was made from the depths of his heart.

The music biopic has reached a tipping point where the next big one is going to have to be less paint-by-numbers and something more than that. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is about as paint-by-numbers as it gets. Jeremy Allen White is excellent in the role, but the material and the story surrounding the performance is subpar. There’s something interesting to the relationship he has with Faye and her daughter, but that very quickly takes a backseat and then doesn’t really resolve.

Through it all, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is only for Springsteen superfans. If you love the album Nebraska, it’s slightly intriguing to see where some of the songs came from, and to see Jeremy Allen White wrestle with the demons that faced The Boss, but this is overly melodramatic and misses the mark where other biopics made the machinations of millionaires interesting.

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