“Deliver Me From Nowhere”: The Redemption Journey of Bruce Springsteen

He makes no effort to conceal himself—black T‑shirt, blue jeans, Wayfarer sunglasses, honky‑tonk cowboy boots—but for a few minutes, the most famous son of the Jersey Shore attains a kind of anonymity, even in the one place his sudden appearance seems most natural: the Asbury Park boardwalk. Passing Madam Marie’s, the fortune teller immortalized in his 1973 ballad “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” I suggest that if people were to look for him anywhere, it would be here. Springsteen chuckles, recalling a T‑shirt sold in local shops: I HEARD BRUCE MIGHT SHOW UP.

Soon enough, we learn what happens when he does. Near the Convention Hall, a double take transforms into a selfie request. More follow. A restaurant owner pleads for him to stay for dinner. Outside the Bruce Springsteen Archives store, a cashier springs up in delight, wearing by chance the very shirt we had just mentioned. “My cloak of invisibility is rapidly fading,” Springsteen says, half amused, half resigned. We take refuge in an empty Stone Pony—the legendary club that launched his career—where we spend the afternoon talking about his life and legacy. As for the crowd he leaves behind when slipping into a car, he says, “I always took it as just part of the job.”

For half a century, Springsteen’s job has been unlike any other. He has released 21 albums, collected 20 Grammys, an Oscar, a Tony, the Kennedy Center Honors, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has written a bestselling memoir, recorded a podcast with Barack Obama, and sold more than 150 million records worldwide. He’s among the most sought‑after live performers on earth, commanding crowds who embrace him with near‑religious devotion. His most recent tour grossed over $700 million—the biggest haul of his career, eclipsing even the Born in the U.S.A. juggernaut of the ’80s.

But Springsteen’s story is more than the scale of his success. He occupies a rarefied place in American life, maintaining an authenticity rare for a performer of his reach, even as he contends with the contradictions of his existence. Springsteen is a tribune of the working class who became fabulously wealthy; a restless outsider who is a rooted family man; the rock star who seemingly has it all but still wrestles with shadows he cannot shake. As his stages expanded—from clubs to theaters, arenas to stadiums—Springsteen chose not to mask the distance between the man onstage and the man in the mirror, but to make it part of the art itself.

Now 76, Springsteen has embarked on another bold move: surrendering control to a filmmaking team to narrate the most vulnerable period of his life. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, in theaters October 24, chronicles the making of Nebraska, his 1982 acoustic masterpiece. Jeremy Allen White plays Springsteen; Jeremy Strong portrays his longtime manager Jon Landau. The film captures a sliver of his early 30s, when he battled his first serious depression, compulsively drove past his childhood home, and eventually sought therapy—a step Springsteen credits with saving his life. “It could have gone in a lot of different directions,” he says.

That crucible reshaped the trajectory of his career, sharpening the themes that have driven his music since—a starker portrait of America, a demand for dignity for the marginalized, redemption for the broken, the possibility of salvation in community—while enabling him to remain both uncompromising and commercially viable. Perhaps just as importantly, it led him to embrace family life: the responsibilities and joys that so often elude rock stars. “Show‑business life is wonderful if it’s part of a larger life,” Landau, his closest confidant, says. “If it becomes a substitute for life, that’s the danger zone.”

After the boardwalk, Springsteen returns to his home studio in Colts Neck, a ten‑minute drive from where he grew up. Fifty years after Born to Run, he may be associated with getting out, but his life has been defined by staying put. “What I worked very hard on was not running, but standing—making your life choices, and then standing with and for them,” he says. “That’s been my theme since that record.” If the heroes of Born to Run found their glory in flight, Springsteen has since offered the counter‑vision: that to stay put, to face your own demons head on, is its own form of heroism.

One gray October afternoon in 2023, Springsteen opened the door of a rented Jersey Shore cottage and ushered three men inside to discuss something he’d long resisted: a film about his life.

He had invited Scott Cooper, director of brooding films such as Crazy Heart and Out of the Furnace; Warren Zanes, author of the definitive book on Nebraska; and Landau, carrying what he claimed were Philly cheesesteaks. “Those were not cheesesteaks,” Zanes remembers. “That was really good steak on artisanal bread with exquisite cheese.”

From the outset, Springsteen was drawn to Cooper’s vision—not a cradle‑to‑grave biopic, but a compact character study. “This narrow time frame reveals deeper truths about Bruce’s lifelong struggles with identity and creative honesty,” Cooper says. Few expected Springsteen to say yes. But with age, Springsteen says, he’s become more willing to agree to proposals he once dismissed. “I’m old. I don’t give a f— what I do anymore!” he says with a grin. “As you get older, you feel a lot freer.”

Springsteen recounts the process in a dimly lit Stone Pony. He became a fixture here around his 1975 breakout Born to Run. He was under a three‑album deal with Columbia; although his first two albums were praised by critics, they disappointed commercially, and the label shifted attention to Billy Joel. At risk of being shelved, Springsteen shed the rhyme‑drunk ballads of his earlier work. He barely had a driver’s license but understood what cars represented to a nation rattled by the oil crisis: gas prices had soared, and an ordinary symbol of American freedom suddenly felt tenuous. If gas is too expensive, you can’t drive. If you can’t drive, you lose agency. “I didn’t know a lot about cars,” he says, “but I knew what they meant. It was simply my metaphor.”

Born to Run fused Dylan’s street‑level detail with the operatic scope of Phil Spector. Its opening track, “Thunder Road,” is a summons: the singer beckons Mary into his car, offering a chance to flee “a town full of losers” for a better life. “Jungleland,” the nine‑minute finale, stages the saga of the Magic Rat and the barefoot girl, slipping across Jersey into Harlem only to see their dreams collapse. Critics hailed Born to Run as a crowning achievement, both sui generis and revitalizing. The counterculture had curdled, Vietnam was over but unsettled, and the economy sagged. Into that drift came a wiry kid from Freehold, NJ, who made the ordinary seem mythic. “It was a magical confluence of things and circumstances that helped deliver this guy and deliver Columbia’s dream,” says Springsteen’s first manager, Mike Appel.

On October 20, 1975, Springsteen appeared on the covers of TIME and Newsweek—a feat once reserved for presidents, popes, or astronauts. To Springsteen, holed up at the Sunset Marquis for a four‑night run at the Roxy, it felt like a curse. “It makes you very, very different from all the people you grew up with,” he says. Success was both exhilarating and terrifying; his sister Pam recalls paparazzi peering into their parents’ kitchen. Springsteen and his circle feared the “hype,” a toxic word suggesting the deflators were not far behind. What haunted him more was how fame might change him. “It’s a very distorted lens to live your life through,” he says. “You have to be very protective of yourself, of what matters dearly to you.”

With Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), Springsteen planted his feet with those who never made it out—using his songs to speak to listeners whom he might never otherwise reach. He turned toward the working class, sketching figures who resembled his father—the stoic men of “Factory,” the dreamers of “Racing in the Street.”

Douglas Springsteen was taciturn, drifting through jobs he couldn’t keep—cabdriver, prison guard—and prone to rages and long silences, staying up late with beer and cigarettes. He was emotionally absent from his three children—Bruce, Virginia, and Pam—and especially hard on his son, never once saying “I love you.” The family’s mediator and breadwinner, the one who carried its optimism, was Bruce’s mother Adele, who worked as a legal secretary. (Bruce now says that his bleak songs came from his father, whereas his joyous ones—“Rosalita,” “Out in the Street”—came from his mother.) For a working‑class man in the 1950s, seeking psychiatric help meant defying social norms. Decades later, Doug Springsteen was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia—opening the possibility of treatment—but Bruce would always fear that the mental‑illness strain in his family might someday ensnare him.

Springsteen’s next record, The River, leaned toward connection. “For a long time, I did not write any love songs,” he says. “I figured other people were covering that. I was interested in other topics, and I simply didn’t know what love was.” The album produced his first Billboard Top 10 single, “Hungry Heart,” and Columbia’s verdict was clear: Springsteen was on the brink of superstardom.

This is where Deliver Me From Nowhere begins. After The River Tour, Springsteen plunged into a psychic freefall. Rather than chasing hits, he retreated to a house in Colts Neck with a four‑track recorder. What emerged was Nebraska: a desolate gallery of outlaws, killers, and lost souls. After laying down demos that would evolve into Born in the U.S.A. (1984)—an album everyone knew was lightning in a bottle—he planned to re-record them with the E Street Band. But the more they re-recorded, the more he despised it, so he decided to release the tapes as they were. When Nebraska dropped on September 30, 1982, Springsteen let the music speak for itself—no interviews, no tour.

He then took a road trip out west and suffered a breakdown, but in therapy found reconciliation—with both his past and his father, portrayed in the film by Stephen Graham. “My father was a tough guy,” Springsteen says. “He was tough when he was young. He was tough on me when I was young. But fundamentally, underneath, he was a vulnerable, fragile, soulful man. I think you see that side of him at the end of the film.” When the movie premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, the reviews were glowing. The film is already generating Oscar buzz.

To inhabit the role, White spent hours studying Springsteen—listening to his memoirs, watching old interviews—but knew not to imitate. He doesn’t mimic Springsteen’s twang, but embodies him psychologically. They first met during a sound check at Wembley Stadium last year and cultivated a friendship. White says he made a pact with Springsteen, Landau, and Cooper: “Let’s make a movie about a musician in this period of his life that just so happens to be Bruce Springsteen.”

If anyone saw Springsteen clearly in that period, it was Landau—portrayed in the film with uncanny precision by Strong. (When he phoned Thom Zimny, Springsteen’s longtime filmmaker, to request archival footage, Strong was still in character—method acting to the core.) Their relationship forms the emotional backbone of the film, elevating it into a love story. After Nebraska’s release, Springsteen considered suicide. Landau told him bluntly, “You need professional help.” The next day, the manager got the star into therapy. “It was and has been a total life changer,” Springsteen says.

After his therapist of 25 years died, Springsteen kept going. “When I walked into a new therapist’s office,” he says, “I had much more information than when I first walked into Dr. Myers’ and said, ‘I don’t have a home, I don’t have a partner, I don’t have a life beyond my work, and those are things I want.’”

The film also portrays a brief romance between Springsteen and Odessa Young’s “Faye” — a composite of several relationships meant to capture his fleeting romances when he began craving commitment. “Maybe it was my biological clock,” he tells me. “I was in my early 30s, and you start wondering, Hey, where’s my everything?”

On the Born in the U.S.A. tour, Springsteen invited singer‑guitarist Patti Scialfa to join the E Street Band. It was 1984, and the album dominated charts, its singles reigned on MTV, and he was soon to marry actor Julianne Phillips. But Scialfa’s arrival shifted everything. They had met nearly a decade earlier at the Stone Pony, and Springsteen recalls the exact spot. “I met Patti right in this chair,” he says, recalling the moment: Scialfa stepping down from the stage, her voice still echoing. “I thought, Who is that redhead singing like Ronnie Spector or Dusty Springfield?” He introduced himself, and the rest, he says with a smile, “has been the rest.”

Toward the end of the decade, his marriage to Phillips ended, his partnership with Scialfa blossomed, and his music turned inward. Tunnel of Love (1987) explored intimacy and the fragility of relationships. “Walk Like a Man,” one of his most piercing songs, begins with a child tracing his father’s footprints on the sand and ends with a groom at the altar, weighing which parts of his father’s legacy to carry forward and which to abandon. In 1991, he married Scialfa. “I knew she saw me for who I really was,” he says. “A complicated, messy person. I didn’t have to pretend. I was broken. She was broken in her own way, and we became each other’s personal projects.”

On the eve of their first child’s birth, Springsteen’s father drove for hours to see him in Los Angeles. Over 11 a.m. beers, Doug told him: “You’ve been very good to us, and I wasn’t very good to you.” That frank admission, Bruce says, was his “greatest gift.” “He had the fortitude and the awareness that I was about to become a father, and he didn’t want me to make the same mistakes.” Soon after, Bruce wrote “Living Proof,” a song about the astonishment of becoming a parent—a declaration of transformation and renewal. Two more children followed. All three now are grown, near the age he was when he made Nebraska.

Fatherhood ended Springsteen’s days of running. “Two of the best days of my life,” he once told Rolling Stone, “were the day I picked up the guitar and the day I learned to put it down.” When I remind him, he smiles: “That’s good. I’ll stand by that.” The guitar, he explains, was his first form of self‑medication. “It was the only way I knew to handle my problems, and it was the instrument I turned to when I felt myself in a lot of psychological or personal turmoil.”

But leaning on it for everything, he says, is “an abuse of the work, an abuse of the instrument.” Music could carry him through the ecstasy of live performance, but beyond that, “You have to find a bigger life. The day you pick it up, that’s the three hours onstage. The day you put it down, that’s the other 21.”

Before stepping onto a Manchester, England stage on May 14, Springsteen gathered the band for their usual ritual, but instead of his familiar pep talk, he offered a warning: “Might get a little heavy tonight,” he said. “We’ll see.”

Minutes later, he delivered a searing monologue that reverberated globally:

“In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about—that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years—is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration.”

Only two people knew in advance: Landau, who read the speech and told him to change “not a word,” and the teleprompter operator. “He mentioned he was going to do a monologue,” recalls saxophonist Jake Clemons—his bandmate and nephew of the late Clarence Clemons. “We didn’t know what it was until we were on stage.”

On the European tour, Springsteen revised his set list, swapping reflections on mortality from his 2020 album Letter to You for fierce political resistance—beginning with “Land of Hope and Dreams,” his gospel‑infused anthem of inclusion and redemption, and closing with Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom,” a hymn of solidarity with the marginalized. “He just got pissed off enough to want to change the theme,” longtime E Street guitarist Steven Van Zandt says. A few months into Donald Trump’s second term, Springsteen was among the first artists of his stature to speak out so forcefully. “If I’m going to stay true to who I’ve tried to be,” he tells me, “I can’t give these guys a free pass.” Politics has long shadowed him: to his anger, Born in the U.S.A., intended as a protest against neglect of Vietnam veterans, was hijacked by Ronald Reagan and recast as a patriotic anthem. “To understand that song,” he says, “you’ve got to hold two contradictory thoughts at once: that you can feel betrayed by your country and still love it.”

Over the years, he has returned to political and social themes—from the AIDS epidemic and the plight of migrant workers, to deindustrialization and the ravages of war. Critics have mocked the irony of a rock star traveling by private jet while singing about the working poor. He owns the contradiction—“a rich man in a poor man’s shirt,” as he writes in “Better Days.” Today the joke is old, yet something else haunts him: the very people he sings about have flocked to Trump. “A lot of people bought into his lies,” he says. “He doesn’t care about the forgotten anybody but himself and the multibillionaires who stood behind him on Inauguration Day.” Springsteen wrestles with another truth: “You have to face the fact that a good number of Americans are simply comfortable with his politics of power and dominance.”

After Springsteen’s speech, Trump called him “highly overrated” and posted a meme depicting himself striking the rocker with a golf ball. When I bring this up, Springsteen laughs. “I absolutely couldn’t care less what he thinks about me.” What he doesn’t laugh about is the state of the nation. “He’s the living personification of what the 25th Amendment and impeachment were meant for. If Congress had any guts, he’d be consigned to the trash heap of history.” Nor does he spare Democrats: “We’re desperately in need of an effective alternative party, or for the Democratic Party to find someone who can speak to the majority of the nation. There is a problem with the language they’re using and the way they’re trying to reach people.”

Springsteen has spent decades exploring the gulf between the American Dream and American reality, the widening economic divides that fueled Trump’s rise: from hollowed‑out Rust Belt cities in “My Hometown,” to the populist rage of his 2012 album Wrecking Ball. “Those conditions are ripe for a demagogue,” he says. “Those things must be addressed if we want to live in the America of our better angels. I still believe it’s there, but it’s struggling.”

During that brief stretch on the boardwalk when we dodge recognition, Springsteen leads me to the spot on the beach where he and the E Street Band performed a year earlier. “One of the top five shows of all time for me,” he says of the Sea.Hear.Now festival. The waves crashed behind the stage as fans—including me—stood barefoot in the sand. Springsteen crafted a unique set list, reaching back to early deep cuts from when he was still finding his voice—“Blinded by the Light,” “Thunder Crack.” The climax came when he performed Born to Run’s final two songs: “Meeting Across the River” into “Jungleland.” The moment caught Springsteen off guard. “I didn’t realize how symbolic it would become for me,” he says. “This town over the past 10 to 15 years returned from the dead. We were here when it was empty and barren.” Here was proof of resurrection: a city revived, a community of fans built over half a century, the arc from isolation to communion—the inverse of the spiritual solitude in which Nebraska was born.

When I ask whether he will tour again with the E Street Band, he doesn’t hesitate. “Of course!” A solo tour may also happen, but none is planned. “I just want to keep going,” he tells me. “I want to make records that tackle subjects people haven’t yet heard me address.”

Meanwhile, he offers other treasures. For years he denied the existence of Electric Nebraska—full‑band versions of the songs he first cut on cassette in 1982. But one day curiosity got the better of him and he found the tapes in his archives. The sessions will be released this fall, timed with the new film. Tracks 3, another collection of unreleased material, is slated for two or three years from now. Springsteen keeps the details close but lets one slip: it will include his famously slow, hypnotic cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Want You.”

Today his days follow a simple rhythm: wake up, work out, head to the studio, and spend evenings with Scialfa—who has battled blood cancer since 2018—reading, watching TV, and listening to music. He’s just finished Moby‑Dick, and the young artists he admires include Zach Bryan and boygenius.

New music of his own is on the way. To continue the conversation with his fans, he says, each album must represent something new. “The first thing that really reaches the public is what they tend to cling to and want you to keep,” he explains. “The writer has to write himself into a box, then be Houdini. You continue working until you feel yourself locked in that larger box—then you’re supposed to escape into a still bigger box.”

He remembers the mid‑’70s, playing for a small crowd in a dingy New York club after the sensation of Born to Run. A friend, baffled, asked: “What are you doing here?” Springsteen had an answer in his mind. “I was just building my little house one block at a time,” he says. “I wasn’t out of the basement yet, but I knew I wanted a career that would live and grow with my audience.” To Springsteen, the Asbury Park concert was the culmination of that long construction project. “I feel the band kept faith with its audience, worked hard to be its best, never went onstage without playing like it was the last night on earth.”

But those are the three hours. The other 21 remain his life’s work. At a show in the ’90s, Springsteen performed “My Father’s House,” a haunting song from Nebraska. The narrator dreams of embracing his estranged father, only to wake, drive to the old house, and find a stranger at the door. His father has vanished, their sins lie unatoned, and the hope of reconciliation lost. On stage, Springsteen prefaced it with a therapy story: He confessed to his habit of circling his childhood home.

“Something bad happened,” Dr. Myers told him. “You’re going back, thinking you can make it right again.”
“That’s what I’m doing,” Springsteen replied.
“Well,” Dr. Myers said, “you can’t.”

When I ask how he absorbed that insight, how he put it into practice, Springsteen pauses. “Well, I don’t know,” he says. “I still drive past that house.”