Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere has not reached the heights that Scott Cooper and Jeremy Allen White would have hoped for. At many points, the story feels meandering, and Deliver Me From Nowhere falls into too many of the pitfalls that most musical biopics contain, with the most egregious of these being its treatment of female characters. Previously, Bohemian Rhapsody and A Complete Unknown suffered from the same issue, with characters like Mary (Lucy Boynton), Sylvie (Elle Fanning), and Joan (Monica Barbaro) coming across as mere footnotes rather than real people. Similarly, in the case of Deliver Me From Nowhere, it feels like it had no idea what to do with female characters if Bruce wasn’t talking to them. This led to characters with no active arc or, even worse, terrible dialogue and framing certain women in Bruce’s (Jeremy Allen White) life as problematic when they should have been sympathetic.
Women Only Exist to Serve Male Stories in ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’
The number one rule of screenwriting is to keep your characters active, constantly moving towards a goal that is personal to them. Even supporting characters should have their own desires and lives outside the protagonist, and, in doing so, enrich the narrative’s deeper themes. Of course, this can be challenging, but that attention to detail is tragically missing from Deliver Me From Nowhere, and Faye (Odessa Young) is the most striking example. While Faye’s romantic subplot with Bruce is one of the core areas of conflict in Deliver Me From Nowhere, she exists entirely within the context of how Bruce perceives her.
Despite being a single mother, her own inner conflicts are never explored, with all the scenes of Faye on her own merely showing her waitressing or being stood up. Because we never see Faye as a person in her own right, it drastically reduces the emotional depth of their relationship. This means that we don’t feel the pain of her walking away from Bruce in the diner, as this is the only decision she makes in the entire film, and it’s the last time we see her. The fact that Faye isn’t a real person, but an amalgamation of different people from Bruce’s life, should have allowed for more artistic license in giving her an individual character arc, but instead led to her feeling surface-level.
While Faye is the biggest waste of potential, Barbara (Grace Gummer) is arguably the worst-written character in Deliver Me From Nowhere because her only purpose is to act as a sounding board for her husband, Jon (Jeremy Strong). There is nothing wrong with Gummer’s performance, but the dialogue she is given makes her sound more like a therapist than a human being. She appears only in scenes where Jon discusses Bruce’s work and frustrations, and her role is to comment on Bruce’s process, often relating it to trauma. However, her language and the semantics she uses feel too modern for a story set in the early 1980s. Even today, it would be unusual to hear someone speak so succinctly about another person’s emotions unless they were a trained professional. But Deliver Me From Nowhere dedicates no time to trying to explain why Barbara speaks like this, which exposes how she is only there to give the audience an insight into Jon’s mind.
‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ Inadvertently Frames Sympathetic Women as Problematic
While an inactive character with poor dialogue can sometimes be forgiven, Deliver Me From Nowhere creates a serious issue with how it portrays women and how that relates to the darker elements of the film. Bruce’s mother, Adele (Gaby Hoffman), is a victim of domestic violence, yet her lack of depth leaves her relationship with Douglas (Stephen Graham) far too open to interpretation. Bruce is given an emotional moment of forgiveness with his father, confronting and accepting the past. In contrast, Adele shifts abruptly from screaming at Douglas in monochrome scenes to desperately begging Bruce to board a plane and find his drunken, missing father. This sharp switch in how Adele treats her husband makes her seem, at best, someone who has forgotten about the abuse and, at worst, accepted it without confrontation. Even in the aforementioned scene between Bruce and Douglas, Adele makes a point of staying outside while they talk, literally cutting her off from this reconciliation with Douglas’ past actions.
Some may argue that this is fine because we see that Bruce loves his mother, protecting her when young, and we don’t need to see her relationship with Douglas play out on screen. However, simply implying growth is not enough; this approach portrays her, along with the other women in Deliver Me From Nowhere, as surface-level thematic reflections of Bruce’s journey, offering little nuance or variety. In the end, musical biopics like Deliver Me From Nowhere need to understand that, just because the audience has come to gain a better understanding of the iconic protagonist, it doesn’t mean those around them, particularly the women in their lives, should hold little to no significance.
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is now playing in theaters in the U.S.
- Release Date
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October 24, 2025
- Runtime
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112 Minutes
