Straight Out of the Great American Musical Biopic Songbook

That’s why they call him the Boss: In Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, our man Bruce—played by a suitably coiffed and toned Jeremy Allen White, an actor who was born to frown while wearing leather jackets—leverages his burgeoning celebrity status against control-freak tendencies that’d probably get a lesser artist booted from their label. It’s 1981, and “Hungry Heart” is on every radio in America—except Bruce’s, that is. He doesn’t want to hear the song’s cheerful hook, nor write another one like it; instead, his ambition is to deliver a collection of stark, haunting American Gothics about thrill killers, economic hardship, and daddy issues. Darned if he’s going to let his troupe of producers and studio engineers—the best ones that money can buy—smooth out the music’s rough edges.