Speaker 1: Andrew. Have you seen the movie?
Speaker 2: I got an exclusive screening in They open a whole
Speaker 2: cinema just for me. Oh cool. That must have been weird,
Speaker 2: very weird. Three hundred seats and me in the center
Speaker 2: in the dark room.
Speaker 1: Did you get popcorn?
Speaker 2: They saw him out a coffee and popcorn and they
Speaker 2: call it work.
Speaker 1: From the Australian. This is the weekend edition of The Front.
Speaker 1: I'm Claire Harvey. There's a new movie out in cinemas,
Speaker 1: a biopic of Bruce Springsteen called Springsteen Deliver Me from Nowhere.
Speaker 1: But it's not about the Boss brancing around on stage
Speaker 1: in tight jeans and a half buttoned cowboy shirt, sweating
Speaker 1: and belting out one of his anthems like Born in
Speaker 1: the USA. It's about Springsteen's sad, bastard pace back in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen eighties, when he retreated to a bedroom
Speaker 1: and wrote the album Nebraska, Ten beautiful songs, all complete downers.
Speaker 1: For all the reasons, Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska is seen as
Speaker 1: modern and relevant today, exploring ideas of isolation, loneliness, fatalism,
Speaker 1: and hopelessness. All those very qualities made the album so
Speaker 1: unorthodox and risky in nineteen eighty two, and that's not
Speaker 1: even factoring in the fact Springsteen produced the album himself,
Speaker 1: not in a commercial studio, but at home with a
Speaker 1: four track recorder and a mental breakdown on the way.
Speaker 1: Today I'm joined by the Australians National music writer Andrew McMillan.
Speaker 1: His feature on the movie is live now at the
Speaker 1: Australians newly launched Culture section. Go do the Australian dot
Speaker 1: com dot u slash culture, or in the Australians app
Speaker 1: tap the Culture tab at the top. It's full of
Speaker 1: the very latest in visual art, music, film, TV, entertainment
Speaker 1: and much more. Here's Jeremy ellen White speaking to Andrew McMillan.
Speaker 2: What did you find were your most valuable resources when
Speaker 2: preparing for the role.
Speaker 3: Really, the most helpful was having access to Bruce and
Speaker 3: really trying to understand on a human level, forget the
Speaker 3: rock star, what was going on with him during this period.
Speaker 3: And I'm very grateful to Bruce for being immediately, so
Speaker 3: forthcoming and honest. It allowed me as an actor and
Speaker 3: to start to draw connections and tethers, and then in
Speaker 3: getting to know Bruce, I was able to find things
Speaker 3: within him that I knew about myself that I could
Speaker 3: kind of decide to expand on or grin to surface.
Speaker 3: Will they blew a chicken Man and Philly last night?
Speaker 2: Now they blew up his house?
Speaker 1: To Andrew, we're talking today about an album that Bruce
Speaker 1: Bringsteen super fans no one loved. The rest of us
Speaker 1: who have a more casual relationship with the Boss might
Speaker 1: not know about Nebraska. What's Nebraska all about? And where
Speaker 1: did it come in Bruce Bringsteen's life.
Speaker 2: Nebraska is an album that Bruce created not knowing he
Speaker 2: was making an album. He finished the river and the
Speaker 2: touring behind that album, playing to arenas full of fans,
Speaker 2: big rock and roll shows with the East Street Band,
Speaker 2: and then, rather than continuing on in that vein of
Speaker 2: making upbeat rock and roll songs, he took himself away
Speaker 2: to a rented ranch house in New Jersey by himself,
Speaker 2: got a TIAC four track recorder, and he started creating
Speaker 2: what he thought were demo songs for his next album potentially,
Speaker 2: But in the process of writing and recording this album,
Speaker 2: he came up with the quietest, darkest set of songs
Speaker 2: that he had released certainly to that point in time.
Speaker 2: In nineteen eighty two and still in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: It's probably the case.
Speaker 1: It's a very sad version of Bruce Bringsteen who we
Speaker 1: hear on this album, and there are stories that he
Speaker 1: tells in his songs that seem almost childlike to me.
Speaker 1: You know. There's a song about a police officer with
Speaker 1: a wayward brother who has to try and help his
Speaker 1: brother avoid going to jail. Stories of heartbreak, and some
Speaker 1: very powerful stories about being an outsider looking in. Mentioned
Speaker 1: on the Hill is about a kid with his dad
Speaker 1: looking up at the town's big grand house.
Speaker 3: Who's a please sadsw.
Speaker 1: That feels autobiographical, was it?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Nebraska is a blending of fact and fiction. It's
Speaker 2: taken from the pages of Bruce's childhood, but he was
Speaker 2: also researching and reading about things that had happened in
Speaker 2: real time in nineteen eighty two and also in the
Speaker 2: recent past, things like a serial killer named Charles Starkweather
Speaker 2: who who had killed a bunch of people in Nebraska,
Speaker 2: and when he was later caught, he couldn't give any
Speaker 2: kind of reasonable explanation for why he had done that.
Speaker 2: And Bruce, as a songwriter, found that fascinating and decided
Speaker 2: to write a song from the perspective of that serial killer.
Speaker 2: But Bruce himself much later in his twenty sixteen book
Speaker 2: Worn to Run, he reflected on Nebraska and described it
Speaker 2: as an unknowing meditation on my childhood and its mysteries,
Speaker 2: and he wanted the songs to feel like awaking dream
Speaker 2: and move like poetry. So it's a set of songs
Speaker 2: which is rooted in reality, slightly fictionalized, but it's this
Speaker 2: blend between his distant past, trying to understand his childhood,
Speaker 2: trying to understand his really distant aloof father, and trying
Speaker 2: to come to terms with the man he was then
Speaker 2: in his early thirties.
Speaker 3: I went directing to feel Different.
Speaker 2: League Law. Once you have your first top ten, they
Speaker 2: worked three for the next.
Speaker 3: Well, we've never been about singles, but the whole story
Speaker 3: just trying to break the little new grail.
Speaker 1: We got a little time, just not a lot. The
Speaker 1: creation of this album is now the subject of a
Speaker 1: movie starring Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Bringsteen. Why did
Speaker 1: the filmmakers choose this part of Bruce Bringsteen's life to
Speaker 1: bring to the big screen.
Speaker 2: Well, it's an adaptation of a great book called Deliver
Speaker 2: Me from Nowhere by Warren Zan's and it's an unusual
Speaker 2: music biography because it's based on a few months or
Speaker 2: perhaps at most a year in an artist's life, and
Speaker 2: that is the time surrounding the recording and later release
Speaker 2: of Nebraska and the one that came next was Born
Speaker 2: in the USA, his biggest collection of stadium filling hits.
Speaker 2: The author Warren Zanes wanted to understand how that happened,
Speaker 2: and there was a section Bruce Is Born to Run
Speaker 2: sixteen memoir where Bruce talked about a mental breakdown that
Speaker 2: happened immediately after the recording of Nebraska, and that was
Speaker 2: the first time that Bruce had described that to anyone,
Speaker 2: and he kind of covered in a few pages and
Speaker 2: then moved on. But Warren Zane's the author of Deliver
Speaker 2: Me from Nowhere, I wanted to know more so with
Speaker 2: Bruce's corporation, he went deep on the time of his
Speaker 2: life and what led to that mental breakdown. And then
Speaker 2: the reason why it's ending up on screen is because
Speaker 2: a writer director named Scott Cooper read Warren Zane's book
Speaker 2: and thought, I need to make a movie based on this.
Speaker 2: It was so gripping and so unusual, such a quiet
Speaker 2: period of withdrawal one of the world's most known artists. Calm,
Speaker 2: what's up?
Speaker 1: You redid everything?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well I subtracted and I pushed.
Speaker 1: Okay, you want to spell out from me what exactly
Speaker 1: you subtracted and what exactly you pushed.
Speaker 2: We're going to get a star.
Speaker 1: He cast Jeremy Allen White, who viewers would know as
Speaker 1: Chef Kami from The Bear, as Bruce Springsteen. They're kind
Speaker 1: of the same age. They physically look quite similar.
Speaker 2: Of course.
Speaker 1: Jeremy Allen White is ridiculously handsome, perhaps more handsome than
Speaker 1: even Bruce Springsteen, but he comes across in his public
Speaker 1: persona as a pretty soulful, kind of sensitive guy. What
Speaker 1: were your impressions of Jeremy Allen White when you interviewed
Speaker 1: him for The Australian.
Speaker 2: A humble guy, for sure. I love The Bear. I've
Speaker 2: been watching that show since it came out. But to
Speaker 2: see him embody a big star like Bruce, that's a
Speaker 2: major leap, And as Jeremy described it to me, it's
Speaker 2: probably something he could not have done if he had
Speaker 2: not previously played a real person, which he did in
Speaker 2: the twenty twenty three film The Iron Claw.
Speaker 3: Perry, I want you to join your brothers in the rack. Yes,
Speaker 3: so I love that.
Speaker 2: We all he plays a professional wrestler and a real
Speaker 2: person Kerry Yvonne Eric. That gave him the confidence to
Speaker 2: be able to try something that for any act would
Speaker 2: be a much bigger leap, which is to play one
Speaker 2: of the world's most recognizable rock stars.
Speaker 1: Ever, it's interesting, isn't it when an actor is trying
Speaker 1: to represent a real life person, especially in someone who
Speaker 1: we know very well. You know, how much do you
Speaker 1: try and kind of mimic their characteristics and adopt their
Speaker 1: accent or interpret it your own way. Bruce Springsteen was
Speaker 1: actually on set for a lot of the filming of
Speaker 1: this movie. How did Jeremy Allen White deal with that?
Speaker 2: How would anybody deal with that? Think about it. If
Speaker 2: you're Jeremy trying to portray Bruce, while Bruce himself is
Speaker 2: watching your every move on the camera, monitorsays, what a
Speaker 2: freaky thing to try and achieve. So Jeremy described to
Speaker 2: me that in that first week of filming, where Bruce
Speaker 2: and his longtime manager John Landau was sitting outside watching,
Speaker 2: he had to eventually go and ask Bruce, hey, can
Speaker 2: you give me a bit of space here, just so
Speaker 2: I can get my sea legs and get a feel
Speaker 2: for how to do this thing, which Bruce understood, and
Speaker 2: he went away for some time, but oddly he kept
Speaker 2: coming back to the set. He wanted to be there.
Speaker 2: He wanted to see them make it, which is a
Speaker 2: really interesting decision for a now seventy six year old
Speaker 2: man to make. To watch this really troubled, uncertain, pretty
Speaker 2: dark period of his life where he physically isolated himself.
Speaker 2: Bruce wanted to see that done again from a distance.
Speaker 2: And I guess with all the experience and knowledge and
Speaker 2: wisdom that he's gained since those.
Speaker 1: Years, society has changed a lot in the forty years
Speaker 1: since Bruce Bringsteen went through that. You know, in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five, it's pretty normal to talk about mental distress
Speaker 1: or struggling with your emotions. That was pretty taboo in
Speaker 1: the eighties. And I guess, especially if you're a rock star,
Speaker 1: how do you think they've brought that to life, And
Speaker 1: what was it like to recreate that for Jeremale and White.
Speaker 2: You're right, Bruce had a breakdown which led to him
Speaker 2: seeking professional help, which was therapy. I think that Bruce
Speaker 2: was himself. I don't know if embarrassed is the right word,
Speaker 2: but I'm sure about revealing that part of himself. He
Speaker 2: described to Warren zanes the author of Delivering Me from Nowhere,
Speaker 2: that he spent the first few years of his therapy
Speaker 2: sneaking in and out of visiting the person who he
Speaker 2: had chosen to speak to. So the question is, of course,
Speaker 2: how do you show that on screen without it being
Speaker 2: dull or boring or uninteresting. It requires a magnetic actor,
Speaker 2: which they certainly have in Jeremy, but it requires a
Speaker 2: really smart script, which Scott Cooper, the director wrote, based
Speaker 2: on Warren Zaneser's a book.
Speaker 1: Coming up. So can Jeremy Allen White convincingly channel the boss.
Speaker 2: A man stand or did well?
Speaker 1: How if there was ever a time when it was
Speaker 1: okay for actors to lip sync or to pretend to
Speaker 1: be playing instruments if they're doing a movie about a musician,
Speaker 1: it seems like it's over now. Timothy Shallamy sang and
Speaker 1: played as Bob Dylan in the biopic that he made
Speaker 1: a couple of years ago. Jeremy Allen White learned to
Speaker 1: play the guitar and sang Bruce Bringsteen's songs in character
Speaker 1: for this movie. How do you think he pulled it off?
Speaker 1: And what do you think about that choice of instead
Speaker 1: of using the original songs and lip syncing along to them,
Speaker 1: recreating them like that, you know, with a whole new voice.
Speaker 2: It's doing the whole thing on hardbone right. Easy mode
Speaker 2: would be to just like you said, lip sync and
Speaker 2: to fudge it and to have someone else's hands picking
Speaker 2: those strings and playing those notes. But Jeremy, as a
Speaker 2: committed actor, he started this project as a non musician.
Speaker 2: He had never sung, nor played guitar, nor played harmonica.
Speaker 2: He had to learn how to do those three things
Speaker 2: in a pretty short space of time in order to
Speaker 2: portray this very stark and vulnerable set of songs. There's
Speaker 2: no hiding in Nebraska. The recordings themselves are bedroom recordings.
Speaker 2: They're imperfect, and that is part of the charm and
Speaker 2: appeal for fans who loved that work. But Jeremy, he
Speaker 2: tasked himself with replicating exactly what Bruce did, and he
Speaker 2: did such a good job that during the recording sessions,
Speaker 2: Bruce himself said that he couldn't tell the difference between
Speaker 2: Jeremy and he. So that shows you the dedication that
Speaker 2: this man has taken to portraying Springsteen on film, And
Speaker 2: to go even further, he recorded those songs professionally at
Speaker 2: RCA Studios in Nashville, and Jeremy Allen White's recordings of
Speaker 2: Bruce Springsteen's songs are going to be released for the
Speaker 2: public to hear, so it's going to exist as an
Speaker 2: audio document as well his performance on screen. I think
Speaker 2: he's done a phenomenal job of playing those songs and
Speaker 2: portraying Bruce in his fullness, not just in his gestures
Speaker 2: and the way he speaks, but his way of phrasing
Speaker 2: in songs, his way of playing guitar and harmonica. And
Speaker 2: I think anyone who sees the film will agree it's
Speaker 2: impossible not to be impressed by the dedication and devotion
Speaker 2: that Jeremy has shown to the role.
Speaker 1: Andrew McMillan is the Australian's national music writer. Springsteen Deliver
Speaker 1: Me from Nowhere is out now. Warren Zane's book Deliver
Speaker 1: Me from Nowhere was recently republished in paperback via Crown
Speaker 1: Penguin Random House. Don't forget to check out our culture
Speaker 1: section live right now at The Australian dot com. Dot au,
Speaker 1: slash culture or in the Australians app. This episode of
Speaker 1: the Front was hosted by me Claire Harvey and produced
Speaker 1: by Jasper Leek. Thanks for joining us on the Front
Speaker 1: this week. Our team also includes Kristen Amiot, Lee at Sammerglue,
Speaker 1: Tiffany Dimak, Josh Burton and Stephanie Combs.