SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE

Here's the decision. This is a fascinating, often striking film about an artist choosing integrity over commercial expectation — Bruce Springsteen, fresh off his biggest tour, insisting on releasing a stark, unglamorous acoustic album against his label's wishes. Jeremy Allen White plays him well, and the dramatic and musical moments land with real weight.

But it's not a film for the whole family. The language is gratuitous and strong, including several "f" words and profanities that misuse Christ's name. There's a partially depicted bedroom scene between Springsteen and a woman invented for the film, plus upper male nudity. The movie also treats Bruce's psychological crisis in purely humanist terms, with therapy as the answer and little spiritual framing.

If you're an adult who appreciates music biography and can weather the rough language and one sexual scene, this is worth your time. If you're choosing for children or teens, this one isn't for them.

It's 1981. Bruce Springsteen has just finished the tour for his biggest album yet, and he retreats to a quiet lakeside home near Asbury Park to figure out what comes next. Haunted by memories of his difficult father and worried that fame is swallowing the working-class roots at the heart of his music, Bruce starts writing songs alone in his bedroom — dark, spare songs about criminals, fathers, and people in trouble. What he does with those songs, and what it costs him, is where the film goes from here.

Three stars means this is a solidly good film with real strengths and real gaps. The dramatic and musical moments are genuinely strong — Jeremy Allen White gives a good performance as Springsteen, and the film is consistently engaging as it traces the making of two very different albums.

Where it falls short is detail. The movie barely explains what most of the songs on NEBRASKA are actually about, aside from the opening track. It never resolves Bruce's relationship with the fictional woman he dates, since she's a composite invented for the film rather than a real person. And it saves the actual nature of his psychological crisis for a written epilogue after the story ends, leaving viewers in the dark for most of the runtime about what he's truly struggling with.

This is a mixed pagan worldview film, and it's worth understanding what that means here. The movie's central theme — artistic integrity — is filtered through a strong Romantic view of art: creative expression as something that answers only to itself, rather than to transcendent truth. When Bruce's depression comes to a head, the film's answer is a therapist, not a pastor or a spiritual framework — a humanist solution to what the film frames as a purely psychological problem.

That said, the film isn't without moral substance. It values integrity, treating other people rightly, and helping others, even as it locates the source of that goodness in personal conviction rather than in God. The film also notes, almost in passing, that Springsteen was raised Catholic and that his songwriting carries a real sense of the darkness of sin — an inheritance the movie doesn't dwell on, but doesn't erase either.

That tension — an artist who can name darkness but reaches for a secular fix — is the film's real subject, whether it means to be or not. Springsteen's own song ends with the line, "And I believe in a promised land." Scripture says that longing runs deeper than any album can reach: "they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one" (Hebrews 11:16).

This is a fascinating, well-acted film about an artist choosing conscience over convenience — and it's also a hard-R-adjacent portrait with language and a bedroom scene that make it unsuitable for family movie night. So here's our answer: worth the trip — adults only. Looking for something the whole family can watch together instead? Start with our latest family-friendly picks.