‘America is worth fighting for’: Bruce Springsteen performs at NY screening of Springsteen biopic
The Boss spoke of “particularly dangerous times” and performed after a New York Film Festival screening of “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.” The movie opens in Philly in October.
Bruce Springsteen showed up at the New York Film Festival for the screening of a movie about his life and gave the crowd a musical pep talk about living through “particularly dangerous times” in America during Donald Trump’s presidency.
Scott Cooper’s film Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere — the Boss’ last name was recently added to the original title — screened Sunday as the New York Film Festival’s Spotlight Gala feature at Lincoln Center.
After the showing of the film about the making of Springsteen’s stark and haunting 1982 masterpiece, Nebraska, Cooper introduced Jeremy Allen White, who stars as Springsteen, and Jeremy Strong, who plays his manager, Jon Landau.
The director and screenwriter of the movie, based on Warren Zanes’ 2023 book Deliver Me From Nowhere, also brought on stage Landau and actors Stephen Graham and Gaby Hoffman, who play Springsteen’s father and mother; Matthew Anthony Pellicano Jr., who plays young Bruce; and Australian actress Odessa Young.
Young, whose father performs in a Springsteen cover band, plays Springsteen’s love interest in the film, though as Cooper accurately put it, the real love story in the film is between Springsteen and Landau, “his manager, confidant, artistic collaborator, and part-time therapist.”
Cooper brought Springsteen on stage and called him “everything and more than you would expect.” Cooper said that after his Pacific Palisades home in Los Angeles burned earlier this year, Springsteen invited him to move in.
The director then led the others offstage to “leave it to the man himself.” Springsteen was then handed an acoustic guitar he referred to as “my weapon of choice.”
Springsteen joked that Pellicano, a 9-year-old from North Jersey’s Bergen County who recently got his first guitar, “has some difficult choices ahead. That’s all I can tell him. But I’ll declare him the future of rock and roll tonight.”
He thanked Cooper who “took a very personal moment in my life, and he honored my experience, my work and, my family.” He also gave a shout-out to Paul Schrader, the Taxi Driver screenplay writer whose script for a planned film titled Born in the U.S.A. gave Springsteen the name for what became the best-selling album of his career.
“I don’t know where the f— any of us would be without Paul Schrader,” Springsteen said with a laugh. “He was alway good about me stealing the title of his film.” (The movie was eventually made as 1987’s Light of Day, starring Michael J. Fox and Joan Jett, with a title song by Springsteen.)
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Then, Springsteen got serious.
He gave a short speech before finishing off the night with a rousing rendition of “Land Of Hope and Dreams,” the title song to his recent live EP. That EP includes a speech in which he calls the Trump administration “corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous” — to which the president responded by calling Springsteen a “dried prune of a rocker.”
“Last thoughts, last thoughts,” Springsteen said at the screening, which was the East Coast premiere after debuting at the Telluride Film Festival last month in Colorado. “These days, you know, we have daily events reminding us of the fact that we’re living through these particularly dangerous times.
“I spent my life on the road, moving around the world as kind of a musical ambassador for America, trying to measure the distance between American reality, where we’ve often fall short of our ideals in the American dream.
“I see that America, as battered as she feels right now. But for a lot of folks out there, she continues to be a land of hope and dreams, not of fear or divisiveness or government censorship or hatred. That America is worth fighting for.”
Other luminaries at the screening included E Street Band members Steven Van Zandt and Max Weinberg, along with music executive Jimmy Iovine. In the film, Iovine’s voice is heard in a phone call with Landau, expressing frustration that Springsteen wanted to release Nebraska as a totally stripped-down album instead of including the commercially viable song “Born in the U.S.A.”
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere opens in theaters in the Philly region and nationwide on Oct. 24. A week earlier, on Oct. 17, Springsteen will release Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition, a box set that include the full-band versions of the Nebraska songs that he chose to not release at the time.