Scott Cooper’s biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere starring Jeremy Allen White will make its world premiere as the Spotlight Gala selection of the New York Film Festival on September 28, with the Boss in attendance.
“White inhabits a legend and lays bare his beating heart in this graceful, exceptionally moving film about a very specific part of peerless American rock icon Bruce Springsteen’s life,” the fest says of Cooper’s film, adapted from Warren Zanes’s 2023 best-selling ‘Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.’
It’s set at an early-’80s crossroads in Springsteen’s career when, still negotiating the transformative waves of his rising fame, he crafted the intensely personal acoustic songs that would become his mythic album Nebraska — at the same time that he was recording demos for Born in the U.S.A., which would catapult him to global superstardom.
The biographical drama from 20th Century Studios, set for an Oct. 24 theatrical release, focuses “on the nitty-gritty of Springsteen’s songwriting, while never shying away from the realities of his familial traumas and personal depression. It’s more than just a tour de force for its incandescent star—it’s a reminder that the reason we love this seemingly larger-than-life hero is because he’s always been palpably human,” says NYFF.
The studio released a first look trailer in June.
It’s is a buzzy get for NYFF, which focuses on showcasing top festival films but with relatively few world premieres as it arrives late in the fall festival calendar — after Venice, Telluride and TIFF. This year, Bradley Cooper is also launching Is This Thing On? as the Closing Night film.
Supporting cast including Jeremy Strong as Springsteen’s longtime manager and co-producer Jon Landau, Stephen Graham and Gaby Hoffmann as his parents, Paul Walter Hauser, David Krumholtz and Odessa Young. The film is produced by Cooper, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Eric Robinson and Scott Stuber. Tracey Landon and Zanes executive produce.
“The New York Film Festival has always felt like a spiritual home for the kind of cinema I believe in,” said Cooper (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace, Black Mass, Hostiles). “To now arrive with a film about Bruce Springsteen—an artist whose music shaped not just a country but my own sense of storytelling—is something I could never have imagined. Getting to know Bruce, to explore his world and his spirit, has been one of the most profound creative experiences of my life. To share that experience with New York audiences, in a city that defines artistic possibility, is both an honor and a responsibility I hold with deep gratitude.”
Springsteen, who occasionally visited the set, recently gave the film a thumbs up.
“Taking its cue from the stark majesty of Bruce Springsteen’s classic album Nebraska, Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere has an intimacy and immediacy that eludes most film biographies,” said NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. “Anchored by Jeremy Allen White’s revelatory performance, this year’s Spotlight Gala selection is a fitting tribute to a living legend.”
The fest’s 63rd edition runs from September 26 through October 13. See Main Slate selections.
