Forget the stadium lights, the fist-pounding anthems and the chart-topping songs. The most powerful music Bruce Springsteen ever made was recorded alone in a bedroom, whispering his darkness—and America’s as well—into a cheap cassette recorder.

The rock star biopic has practically become a genre all its own of late. In the past few years, Bob Dylan, Queen, Elton John and Elvis, to name just a few, have already been immortalized on film—and more big-budget movies are in the works. In an age when movie theaters struggle to attract audiences outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, these biopics are like musical breadcrumbs leading older audiences back to the box office. 

On its face, Scott Cooper’s “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” could be just another offering in the burgeoning Rock Cinematic Universe, but it actually exists in a different galaxy. In the standard rock star narrative, ambitious but otherwise unremarkable young men (let’s face it, it’s only the men whose stories have been told so far) toil mightily in obscurity for success and eventually triumph to become rock gods. “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” flips that script and tells the story of a rock god who becomes a man. 

The film opens in 1981 with Springsteen, played by Jeremy Allen White of “The Bear,” on stage in Cincinnati finishing up the last night of a yearlong tour of sold-out arenas across the United States and Europe. His most recent album, “The River” (1980), had been enormously successful, selling millions of copies and topping the Billboard album chart on the strength of his first top-10 single, “Hungry Heart.” 

The adrenaline of the tour quickly fades as he takes up residence alone in a rented home on a reservoir in Colts Neck, N.J. It is in that solitude, not far from where he grew up, that Springsteen tries to adjust to life off the road. 

He returns to his old routines, sitting in with bands at the The Stone Pony, the Asbury Park, N.J. club that he made famous. He begins to date Faye (Odessa Young, playing a composite character), a young single mom from the Jersey Shore area. At home, he begins recording new songs using a small four-track cassette recorder in his bedroom. 

His friend and manager Jon Landau— played by Jeremy Strong of “Succession”—is well aware that Springsteen has found adjusting to life off the road to be emotionally difficult in the past; but he begins sensing that this time around, the situation is more complex. 

Drawing on the southern Gothic stories of Flannery O’Connor and the alien strangeness of songs like “Frankie Teardrop,” by the downtown New York City duo Suicide, the new songs Springsteen is recording in his bedroom don’t sound like attempts to follow up on the commercial success of “Hungry Heart.” They are spare recordings with just a guitar, vocal and perhaps an overdubbed harmonica, glockenspiel or tambourine. The songs sound haunted and, at times, desperate and filled with dread. The limitations of the technology he is using help give a strangely mesmerizing power to the music. Its rawness makes it sound like an artifact from an archivist’s collection of field recordings of folk and blues songs. It is a distress call from another world.

Inspired by Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” the title song “Nebraska” is sung from the perspective of Charles Starkweather, a 19-year-old who, accompanied by his 14-year-old girlfriend, murdered 11 people in the late 1950s in Nebraska and Wyoming. The character in Springsteen’s song—like the actual killer—is unrepentant. He simply asks his executioner that when he “pulls that switch…you make sure my pretty baby is sittin’ right there on my lap.” 

“Mansion on the Hill” is a child’s meditation on wealth and class from outside the gates of privilege. “Johnny 99” tells the story of an unemployed auto worker who gets drunk and kills a man but, instead of serving his 99 year sentence, tells the judge: “Well, your honor, I do believe I’d be better off dead…let them shave off my hair and put me on that execution line.” “My Father’s House” is a nightmare of a child’s desperate search for safety in the arms of his father. 

Needless to say, these are not themes that fit easily into a Top 40 radio playlist today, never mind in the early 1980s. As he taps into the inspiration and desperation of the characters in his new songs, Springsteen is channeling his vision of America in the early Reagan years—a time of economic inequality, social disconnectedness and patriotic jingoism. The characters in the songs he was writing were not experiencing Reagan’s “morning in America.” The America they lived in felt more like it was approaching midnight—and there was a bad moon rising. 

This bleakness and tension is also part of Springsteen himself. Throughout the film, black and white flashbacks return him to his childhood in the small town of Freehold, N.J. His father, Douglas —played with brilliant, stoic power by Stephen Graham—is a brooding, isolated figure who drinks too much and struggles to keep a job. We see a young Springsteen being sent by his mother into a local bar to retrieve his father, telling him it’s time to come home. 

In later flashbacks, the drunken father bursts into his young son’s bedroom, pulling him out of bed to teach him to box because he thinks he is too soft and sensitive. 

The young Springsteen is terrorized by his father’s unpredictability, anger and violence. Springsteen the adult, at age 32 in 1981, is successful and celebrated but doesn’t understand his own restlessness and sense of alienation. He is disconnected and struggling, failing to make stable emotional connections in his relationships, and the terror of his childhood is never truly in the past. 

His father’s mental illness is an ongoing saga. He gets emergency calls from his mother when his father goes missing and must fly across the country to track him down. He eventually finds him in the bar of a random Chinese restaurant, quietly sitting and drinking, and gently convinces him to go home. 

The real Douglas Springsteen was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, and his only son is terrified that he is cursed with the same disease. 

In the midst of this upheaval, he records an exciting new track with the full E Street Band, “Born in the USA.” Landau is electrified by the song and believes that this is the direction the next album should take. Springsteen is not convinced. He believes the music he is making by himself has a different power and urgency to it. It is the musical statement he wants to make, and to compound the issue around its technical and commercial limitations, he wants to put it out without any touring or promotion to support it. 

It would be difficult to exaggerate how extraordinary it was for a major artist of Springsteen’s caliber to release “Nebraska” on the heels of a commercial breakthrough like “The River.” It is akin to Michael Jackson following up the wild success of “Off the Wall” with a collection of waltzes recorded on a Walkman in his basement instead of “Thriller.” 

Despite pressure from his record label to capitalize on the “rocket ship” of Springsteen’s recent career success, Landau begins to understand his client’s passionate commitment to the cassette of homemade songs that he has been carrying around in his pocket, without a case, for months. It is not the commercial followup he expected—it is not even technically up to the recording standards of a professionally released album—but it is the creative statement his artist needs to make. Landau ultimately stands behind his artist’s desires and tells the head of Columbia Records, who is visiting Landau and looking on in disbelief, “in this office we believe in Bruce Springsteen.” 

Landau’s belief in his artist is deeply bound up with an even more profound concern for his friend. Springsteen is clearly having a breakdown of some sort. He is confronting emotional and psychological wounds that Landau does not completely understand. But Landau convinces his friend that he needs help, which leads to a powerful and moving confrontation with Springsteen’s emotional darkness. 

The partnership between Jeremy Strong’s Landau and Jeremy Alan White’s Springsteen transcends music and career. It is complex and movingly rendered on screen by two of the finest actors working today. In many ways, “Deliver Me From Nowhere” is not a biopic for Springsteen fans at all but a story of male friendship and love. The fact that it takes male vulnerability, mental illness and therapy seriously makes it a complete outlier in a Rock Cinematic Universe that has gorged itself on romantic notions of artistry that are laced with lethal delusions. Living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is not an artistic statement; it is an adolescent death fantasy masquerading as a revolutionary aesthetic. 

Sadly we are all aware of the litany of tragedies that have robbed us of our most incandescent artists and performers. The personal and creative relationship between Springsteen and Landau makes it hard not to wonder if some of those tragedies could have been avoided if the demands of the marketplace were not always front of mind for artist management.

When it was released in September of 1982, “Nebraska” perplexed much of the record-buying public. But in the intervening decades, it has grown in stature to be considered a low fidelity masterpiece, sometimes cited by musicians and critics as Springsteen’s finest collection of songs. 

And what became of the song he passed over while creating “Nebraska?” “Born in the USA” became the title track for his next album, released two years later. That album went on to sell tens of millions of copies and had seven songs in the Top 10.