“Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” kicked off AFI Fest last week with all the hoopla befitting a film about one of America’s most iconic artists. Throngs of autograph-seeking fans gathered near the TCL Chinese Theatre as spotlights illuminated the red carpet arrivals of the film’s director and screenwriter, Scott Cooper, alongside Bruce Springsteen and star Jeremy Allen White, who portrays him in the biopic.
Yet the premiere was also steeped in irony: a night of Hollywood glamour devoted to a movie about the making of “Nebraska,” the stark, home-recorded album Springsteen released in 1982 without any fanfare — no singles, no press and no tour.
If anyone understands that juxtaposition, it’s Cooper. “Springsteen wasn’t seeking fame or absolution,” the 55-year-old filmmaker says over Zoom. “In fact, he’s turning away from that and just trying to understand himself, like most of my characters who are trying to reclaim a piece of their humanity. He finds salvation through honesty.”
Cooper has built a career out of these pursuits of raw truth. That motif originated with his 2009 directorial debut, “Crazy Heart,” starring Jeff Bridges as a faded country music legend caught in the throes of alcoholism and trying to find a way forward. Its emotional honesty landed Bridges an Oscar.
“I’m always interested in exploring men at their breaking points, when silence no longer protects them,” Cooper says. ”Most of my films circle back to broken men searching for grace, not through victory but through endurance.”
Since “Crazy Heart,” Cooper has moved fluidly across genres, continuing to draw A-list actors to his projects. “Out of the Furnace,” a Rust Belt industrial tragedy, featured Christian Bale and Casey Affleck. He went on to make the Whitey Bulger gangster film “Black Mass,” starring Johnny Depp, then “Hostiles,” a western with Bale, Rosamund Pike and Wes Studi.
All of these films are bound by a singular focus: trauma carried forward. Even Cooper’s 2021 supernatural horror movie “Antlers,” starring Keri Russell and Jesse Plemons as siblings, is at its heart about the damage that passes from parent to child, while gothic mystery “The Pale Blue Eye” — an Edgar Allan Poe origin story and Bale’s third collaboration with Cooper — is haunted by grief that metastasizes into violence.
Along the way, owing to the success of “Crazy Heart,” Cooper was frequently approached to direct music biopics, all of which he turned down. He had no interest in the familiar cradle-to-arena story arc, big on spectacle but short on substance. Yet he seized the chance when producers — knowing they’d need the right filmmaker before approaching Springsteen — reached out about adapting Warren Zanes’ 2023 book “Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska,” which documents the darkest chapter in Springsteen’s life.
After a successful tour for his fifth album, 1980’s “The River,” Springsteen felt empty and alienated. Struggling with depression, an identity crisis and unresolved childhood wounds, he retreated to a bedroom in a rented New Jersey house to confront it all. There, Springsteen wrote and recorded the bare-bones songs that would constitute “Nebraska.”
Jeremy Allen White in the movie “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.”
(Macall Polay / 20th Century Studios)
To Cooper, Springsteen’s deeply personal reckoning was where the truth lived, and he knew exactly who could embody it. In “The Bear’s” White, Cooper saw an actor who’d capture Springsteen’s dualities — swagger and fragility, quiet intensity and vulnerability — and who was committed to total immersion. White learned to play harmonica and guitar and to sing for the film, even working with a movement coach to inhabit Springsteen’s physicality.
Like Cooper, Springsteen himself had long resisted biopics, wary of anything artificial, but the director’s unvarnished films, particularly “Crazy Heart,” “Hostiles” and “Out of the Furnace,” resonated deeply with him. Springsteen recognized a filmmaker who shared his sensibility and would do justice to the most painful chapter of his life.
“You have to give me a Scott Cooper movie,” Cooper recalls Springsteen saying to him when they met. “A film that doesn’t sand off the edges or shy away from the truth.” Cooper agreed that was the only way to tell his story.
The filmmaker’s involvement almost seems fated. Growing up in Virginia, he was raised on country and bluegrass music thanks to his father, who also introduced him to Springsteen’s “Nebraska.” Years later, Cooper wrote the screenplay for “Out of the Furnace” while listening to that album, an unwitting prelude to what would eventually bring the pair together.
Like Springsteen’s songs, Cooper’s films gravitate toward stories rooted in working-class life and the edges of the American dream.
“What Bruce and I share is trying to map the psychological geography of America, the forgotten corners, the working-class towns, people who live on the margins, people who live between this notion of myth and decay,” Cooper says, “That’s where the American dream and American reality collide.”
“Most of my films circle back to broken men searching for grace, not through victory but through endurance,” says Cooper, left, pictured on the set of “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” with Jeremy Allen White.
(Matt Infante / 20th Century Studios)
“I grew up around working-class people,” he continues. “That’s where dignity and struggle coexist and I understand the pride that comes with simply enduring. There’s an honesty there and a refusal to posture. I’ve always been drawn to the people who keep the country running, whose stories don’t make the headlines but who carry extraordinary emotional and moral weight.”
That reverence traces back to Cooper’s grandfather, a coal miner whose life embodied the grit and endurance populating these films: beautifully shot, ’70s-style character-driven narratives with lingering compositions that center on a face, where silence is a language. Cooper’s pacing requires patience, but rewards with the quiet pulse of something lived in and true.
Even so, Cooper says his films can be divisive. “They’re meant to provoke feeling, not necessarily comfort,” he says. “They deal in quiet emotion, pain, moral ambiguity and slow-burn tension, and that doesn’t always sit easily with people.”
For Affleck, who earned raves for his turn as an unemployed Iraq war veteran with PTSD in “Out of the Furnace,” that’s exactly what makes Cooper’s work compelling.
“I love Scott’s movies,” Affleck says over the phone the day after the “Springsteen” premiere. “They aren’t always easy to watch and they don’t follow the worn path, so sometimes there are feelings of: Where are we going? But when you arrive, you know that you have been led somewhere on purpose.”
Casey Affleck in the 2013 movie “Out of the Furnace,” directed by Scott Cooper.
(Kerry Hayes / Relativity Media)
“It’s a different kind of moviegoing experience,” the “Manchester by the Sea” star adds. “Some movies are about escape and some are about encounter. And guess which kind Scott makes?”
Cooper’s films resist easy endings. As the end credits roll, his characters seem to have lives that continue beyond the frame.
“I’ve never believed in tidy endings because life certainly hasn’t offered them to me,” the filmmaker says. “I’m not interested in resolution. I’m interested in recognition, the moment when a character or the audience finally sees something clearly, even though it’s painful.”
Cooper’s unflinching pursuit is rooted in his own life. When he was just 4 years old, his family was struck by tragedy when his older sister died of meningitis at age 7. It was a loss Cooper was too young to fully understand, but it left an indelible emotional imprint, a hollow that never closed.
To protect his parents, Cooper says he hid his grief.
“You start to carry things alone,” he shares, pausing for a moment to collect his thoughts. “That’s why my films are filled with silence. It’s not an aesthetic choice. It’s an emotional truth because I know what it feels like to sit across from someone you love and not want to burden them. What’s unspoken in my movies is rooted in my childhood sense that pain is something you live with, not something you talk about.”
Jeff Bridges, left, and Robert Duvall in Scott Cooper’s “Crazy Heart.”
(Lorey Sebastian / Fox Searchlight)
Before he focused on filmmaking, Cooper sought an emotional outlet in acting, landing small television and film roles. However, it was writing and directing that truly gave him a voice, revealing more of Cooper than any performance could.
“It has become a way to speak to things I didn’t say growing up,” he says. “Filmmaking forces me to sit with my own ghosts, the loneliness and the grief I carry from childhood. It seeps into everything — the way I see people, how I write about them and frame a shot.”
Still, Cooper’s films do more than process grief. They bear witness to his parents. “The loss of a child is the deepest wound there is,” he says. “It’s the kind of grief that never resolves, that just changes shape over time. So most of my films, in one way or another, are about people living in the aftermath of that kind of loss, whether it’s literal or emotional. It’s not something that I purposely set out to repeat, but it’s clearly where my heart seems to go.”
The compassion Cooper brings to his work is something he rarely extends to himself. Driven by both an uncompromising work ethic and an unyielding devotion to realism, he pushes himself to extremes. His filming locations have sometimes led to grueling shoots in inhospitable conditions: 12,000 feet above sea level with rattlesnakes and harsh weather for “Hostiles,” and subzero temperatures for “The Pale Blue Eye,” where Cooper searched tirelessly for a tree with a branch that extended parallel to the ground to fit the film’s narrative.
Nowhere was his discipline more apparent than during the making of “Deliver Me From Nowhere.” Cooper’s father died the day before shooting began. He didn’t allow himself time to grieve. Instead, in the spirit of honoring the man who had introduced him to the album the film chronicles, Cooper pressed on with production, later dedicating the film to his father (an especially resonant tribute given the film’s exploration of Springsteen’s fraught relationship with his own father). During the final week of the shoot, while filming a concert scene, Cooper learned that his house in the Pacific Palisades was burning to the ground. Still, he continued.
Cooper acknowledges his fierce commitment to his work with a smile that says guilty as charged, before contemplating his perfectionism. “I’ve always believed if you don’t hold yourself to an almost impossible standard, you’ll never get close to anything true,” he says. “It’s a compulsion, the need to dig deeper, to understand and to get it right.”
Neither ambition nor vanity, his drive is perhaps the residue of a childhood spent trying not to be a burden, where validation could only come through sacrifice.
“It comes from wanting to make sense of loss, to wrestle chaos and shape it into order, or in my case, art,” Cooper says without hesitation, as if stating something he’s long accepted. “That’s what obsession is in its purest form. So yeah, I’m hard on myself. I suppose I always will be.”
