Film Reviews: New Musical Biopics, ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ and ‘Blue Moon’

Don’t expect either Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere or Blue Moon to resemble past musical biopics. Leave aside the issue of fidelity to fact. (Virtually all movies in this genre diverge from historical accuracy at least to some degree.)

What unites these glimpses into the careers and psyches of The Boss and American Songbook lyricist Lorenz Hart is a preference for a different kind of life story: not broad, years-spanning overviews of their subject, but ones focusing intently on narrow time frames.

You don’t have to look any further than Jamie Foxx in Ray or Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody to know that such films can be Oscar bait, and the two films I’ll examine—with performances by Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen and Ethan Hawke as Hart—promise to be contenders at awards time, too.

Although Hawke effects more of a physical transformation than White, both actors ultimately aim to capture their subjects at turning points, when it’s a real question whether they will succumb to depression.

Based on Warren Zanes’ nonfiction account of the making of Nebraska, an instrumentally spare LP recorded on a 4-track recorder in Springsteen's New Jersey home, the title of Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere strongly hints at the heavy psychic baggage he was carrying following the January 1981 conclusion of the tour to promote The River.

With the hurly-burly of the road over, Springsteen experienced a nervous breakdown, sparked by memories of a childhood shadowed by a father afflicted with then-undiagnosed bipolar disorder. At the same time, the rock ‘n’ roller was restless about Columbia Records’ demands for a blockbuster that would take his career to undreamed heights.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere does not dispense completely with all conventions of the biopic: there is a composite character, Springsteen’s waitress girlfriend (played movingly by Australian actress Odessa Young). 

But its sense of authenticity seems earned, not just in New Jersey towns like Freehold where Springsteen lived but also in considerable fidelity to the facts of his life in the period leading up to the September 1982 release of Nebraska.

Some conservative commentators on social media have chortled that the movie hasn’t enjoyed commercial success. (“Born To Flop” was one inevitably unimaginative encapsulation of this mindset.) 

Others, more charitably disposed to Springsteen, have wondered why the film couldn’t have picked a more upbeat period in his career, such as the epic recording sessions for his Born To Run breakthrough or the blockbuster Born in the USA.

I doubt if this was how screenwriter-director Scott Cooper viewed it, however. The period he depicts marked a point when, despite Columbia’s pressure—and even the puzzled acquiescence of manager and friend Jon Landau (an especially good Jeremy Strong)—Springsteen stayed true to his artistic vision with Nebraska, a spare LP that plumbed the depths of recession-battered Middle America.

Moreover, his decision to seek counseling for his longstanding depression—and his resulting closeness with his troubled father (played by Stephen Graham)—meant that he would step away from his private abyss and not become a rock ‘n’ roll casualty like Elvis Presley.

In contrast, we know from its opening scene that Blue Moon will be a show-business post-mortem, as a drunken Lorenz Hart stumbles on a street alone on a rainy night, and, we’re informed, dies of pneumonia. 

The film then flashes back eight months to March 1943, on the opening night of Oklahoma!—a project inaugurating a 17-year collaboration between Hart’s partner, composer Richard Rodgers, and a simpler, more dependable lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II.

Blue Moon (named, of course, for one of Rodgers and Hart’s most memorable hits) is, unlike Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, a talk-fest, taking place in the famed Manhattan restaurant Sardi’s on the post-premiere party for Oklahoma! The lyricist, conveying his congratulations to the new songwriting team, can’t help but snipe at their subject matter, so removed from the contemporary urban sensibility he cultivated.

Director Richard Linklater and screenwriter Robert Kaplow had a low bar to surmount in terms of cinematic treatments of Hart. With Words and Music (1948), MGM trotted out some of their more glittering stars of the time (Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Janet Leigh, and June Allyson), but by necessity remained silent on whether Hart was gay (a common assumption among his associates).

That kind of sanitization is not a problem in Blue Moon, which is far more forthright about Hart’s sexual orientation, alcoholism, friction with Rodgers (and the latter’s extramarital dalliances), and the songwriting team’s Jewish roots.

Linklater has had prior experience with narrowly framing the career of a show-business legend with his 2008 adaptation of Kaplow’s novel Me and Orson Welles. 

But the task that the two collaborators set for themselves this time is considerably more difficult, as the camera is almost exclusively confined to a single room, without resorting to the unusual camera angles and other visual tricks employed by Alfred Hitchcock, for instance, in Dial M for Murder.

Implicitly, they trust that their potential audience—the kind that snaps up every bit of movie and Broadway musical lore (there are briefly, possibly apocryphal, appearances by E.B. White, "The Sting" director George Roy Hill, and a predictably precocious "Stevie" Sondheim)—will be as intoxicated by the quips of Hart ("a little touch of Larry in the night") as the lyricist was with alcohol. 

In this, they are helped enormously by the presence of Hawke, in a performance unlike any he has given before in his 40-year career.

Viewers will latch onto the radical physical changes (e.g., shaving his head and using what he calls “stagecraft” to appear shorter) that transformed him into the balding, gnomish Hart. But they’re likely to overlook how he virtually inhabited the witty but self-loathing character in virtually every frame of the movie.

Hawke conveys a whole range of emotions that often belie Hart’s surface bravado: self-consciousness, defensiveness, sensitivity, generosity, irresponsibility. This is a genius as unpredictable with his words as his work habits, leading to fissions in his relationship with the more organized Rodgers.

It's not a surprise that, in their ninth collaboration, Linklater has elicited such a strong performance by Hawke. 

But he has also found strong supporting players in Andrew Scott as Rodgers, Bobby Cannavale as the sympathetic bartender Eddie, and, donning a blond wig, Margaret Qualley as Elizabeth Weiland, Hart's "protegee," a Yale student and aspiring production designer.

 (Kaplow bought from a bookseller carbon copies of her letters to the lyricist, inspiring much of the movie's dialogue.)

Neither Blue Moon nor Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere has been a box-office success. Neither is what might be called a crowd-pleasing feature. But with time, both will find wider audiences on streaming platforms for their piercing looks at the loneliness lurking behind so many of the famous.