Real Life Rock Top 10: November 3, 2025
Alienation, Misunderstanding, Discovery, and Revelation, Featuring Jeremy Allen White, Zoe Saldaña, Mike Figgis, and Sonny Til
1 Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, written and directed by Scott Cooper (20th Century Studios). The 1982 Nebraska as if it were written by Bruce Springsteen’s inner child, not a thinking person trying to make sense of where he lived now; it would have been nice if there were a scene of Jeremy Allen White’s Bruce walking into a post office to mail a tape and a picture of Ronald Reagan on the wall. But the movie found moments that stick. When in the midst of White’s bedroom recordings there’s a cut to a record studio where “Born in the U.S.A.” is happening, it’s absolutely there, with the line “Hiring man says, Son, if it was up to me” coming across as a whole novel in those ten words, for the way they’re written, for the way, now, they’re sung. As “Nebraska” takes form, when you see a page in a lyric note book with a third person replaced with a first, you can feel the stakes being raised. Near the end, White and Jeremy Strong, who plays Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau, sit in a room together. Landau puts on the Soul Stirrers’ 1955 “Last Mile of the Way,” with Sam Cooke—before he was, as they called it, turned out as a pop singer—going far beyond anyone else’s last mile, and you hear the quiet on their faces, their understanding that the music they’re hearing is beyond anything they will ever do. Only “Reason to Believe,” at the end, rang false in its uplift. “I had dinner at home with him and his wife, [Patti Scialfa], before we started filming,” White said in an October 29 story by Ryan Coleman in Entertainment. “We spoke a lot about ‘Reason to Believe.’ What I take away from that song, and what he thinks people misunderstand about that song. I believed that there was hope in that song, and he said, ‘That’s not the case.’” I remember talking to Springsteen about the song at the time, about how far people can go to convince themselves that a cynical song that touches them doesn’t mean what it says:
