by Gill Pringle in LA
Tasked with playing a fictionalised version of Bruce Springsteen’s girlfriend in biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, Australian actress Odessa Young nailed it – according to none other than The Boss himself.
“She’s totally a Jersey girl in the picture,” declares Springsteen, 76, when we meet him in Beverly Hills.
“It was wonderful to see, but also, she embodied the idea of the saying: It’s better to have loved than to not have loved at all. And she’s trying to teach me that in the film. I’m incapable of learning that at the time, but her incredible generosity in the film, and the complete giving of herself, I found very moving,” he says of the 27-year-old actress who plays his love interest, Faye, in Scott Cooper’s film which focuses on a very specific moment in the rock star’s life.
Namely, the dark depression that he suffered in the early 1980s while working on his deeply personal album, Nebraska.
If music icons such as Elton John, Freddie Mercury and Bob Dylan have been the subject of recent music biopics, then Springsteen was reluctant to jump on the bandwagon, ultimately persuaded by director/writer Cooper.
Impressed by Cooper’s films, particularly his 2009 drama Crazy Heart – in which he directed Jeff Bridges to a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of a fictional country star, Bad Blake – The Boss agreed to take a meeting.
“I knew from Scott’s films that he had a real talent for capturing blue collar life which, despite some of the success I’d had, I was still really living in New Jersey and in my community that I grew up in.
“Also, I’m old and don’t give a fuck what I do anymore,” says the beloved singer/songwriter/guitarist.
Recalling his apprehension about meeting Springsteen for the first time – together with his longtime manager Jon Landau [played by Jeremy Strong in the film] – Cooper says, “When you travel to the Jersey Shore to meet Bruce Springsteen and Jon Landau, if you know as much about them as I do, it’s anxiety inducing. But two or three minutes in, Bruce put me at ease. Bruce is so incredibly kind, decent and humble and relaxed and confident in a way that comes from years of expressing yourself, that he made me feel right at home,” says Cooper of that first meeting where he would outline his concept for a starkly minimalist take on this dark period in the musician’s life.
“And Bruce said to me something that I have not forgotten. He said: ‘You know, the truth about yourself isn’t always pretty, and I want you to tell the truth . . .’ And I think I have.”
“But when you’re approaching a story about Bruce Springsteen, the bar is significantly higher because of what Bruce means to so many – having seen Bruce surrounded by 100,000 people, I know that people have ownership of Bruce Springsteen, and he has moved them and touched them in ways that few people have.
“So, when you’re making a film about that man, so many people have a version of the film that they would like to see. Is it the ‘Born to Run’ story? Or the steel mill days? Is it ‘Born in the USA’? Is it something later in Bruce’s life?
“Instead, we’ve chosen to tell a very painful chapter in Bruce’s life, and one that’s incredibly under-reported. If you read Bruce’s autobiography, Born to Run, you’ll see that most chapters are quite lengthy about his life, except for Nebraska, which is a page and a half – and for a record to mean so much to me on a personal level, and come to me at just the right time in my life, I knew how to tell that story,” says the director.
It didn’t take long for The Boss to get on board.
“I liked the idea that it really is not a music biopic. It’s actually a character driven drama with some music. And also, it’s only a small slice of a period of time in my life, when I was 31 and 32 and I was going through the first of some difficult times,” says Springsteen.
“And it’s pretty good. I’m 31 – and I look like Jeremy Allen White! So, I didn’t have any problems with it,” quips the rock legend, referencing the handsome The Bear actor who portrays him in the film.
“And so, I met with Scott, along with Warren Zanes, who wrote the book, Deliver Me from Nowhere. And we just sat and talked, and I got a feeling that Scott knew exactly the kind of picture he wanted to make – a studio picture that felt like an independent picture.”
If most of us are familiar with the broad brushstrokes of Springsteen’s personal life – the brief marriage to model Julianne Phillips in 1985, before falling in love with fellow E Street Band musician Patti Scialfa – then Deliver Me from Nowhere looks at the troubled man beneath the trappings of global stardom.
Springsteen’s father – poignantly portrayed by Stephen Graham – suffered from health issues and alcoholism, frequently changing jobs from bus driver to delivery man.
Turning to music as an escape from his troubled childhood, Springsteen was still reckoning with his past when he began recording Nebraska – an introspective album that nobody anticipated as a follow-up to the rocking hits of his hugely successful The River and Born To Run albums.
“Mental health struggles touch all of us, all walks of life, all socio-economic classes,” says Cooper. “And I thought, if I could tell this very painful chapter of Bruce’s life in a way that made it relatable, that many people who could see themselves in that story and be able to take away from that – that Bruce was able to get the help that he needed.
“And I said to Bruce – my hope is that people will think they’re coming into a movie about Bruce Springsteen, and they’ll leave thinking it’s a story about themselves. Quite sadly, Bruce’s relationship with his father is far more universal and relatable than I could have ever imagined,” he says.
Springsteen agrees. “I was a guy at the time who I knew what I was doing for three hours every night – but I didn’t have a clue as to what I was doing for the other 21,” he says.
“Odessa’s Faye symbolises the potential and the possibilities of those other 21 hours that I was incapable of taking advantage of at the time. She holds down a very important part of the film, as the symbol of a real life and another life that was waiting for me out there that I wasn’t able to find till much later in my life.”
Filmed on locations around Springsteen’s New Jersey hometown, Jeremy Allen White was understandably nervous whenever The Boss visited the set.
“I was really excited to have Bruce around, but also a little intimidated,” he admits. “But it felt good that he was there as kind of a guide. And at the end of many days, Bruce would send a message about a particular moment that he found perhaps honest, so that really carried me. I was really pushing and searching and so it was wonderful to have Bruce’s support.”
Springsteen has a different take on his input. “Jeremy was so generous because I figured, ‘damn, I’m being obnoxious here.’ Not only has the poor guy got to play me, he’s got to do it while I’m sitting with the director on the other side of the camera. So, he was very generous with his tolerance of me on the set,” says the rocker who would even record lines from the script to help Jeremy switch into his distinctive gravelly voice.
“But the nice thing is that, in the film, Jeremy doesn’t attempt to imitate the way I actually sound, which people always say to me on the phone. ‘Oh, did I just wake you up?’ No. I sound like this all the time!” laughs the prolific artist who will release his 22nd studio album next year.
“Jeremy just really inhabited the essence of my character and brought the rest of himself to it, which I am very thankful for.”
For Young – who launched her career in Sydney on TV series Tricky Business and Wonderland before moving to the US, aged 18 – it was a dream role.
In perfecting her Jersey accent, she regularly listened to Springsteen’s 1973 song, ‘Wild Billy’s Circus Story’.
“I used that as my accent warm-up because there are so many words in there – Bruce,” she teases Springsteen who quips right back: “That’s my specialty.”
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is in cinemas now
