SYNOPSIS: An inside look at the creative process of an iconic performer, “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” is an up-close-and-personal look at the making of his 1982 album “Nebraska,” a turning point in Bruce Springsteen’s career. “It’s like he’s channeling something deeply personal and dark,” says Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong).
CAST: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham, Odessa Young, Gaby Hoffmann, Marc Maron, David Krumholtz. Directed by Scott Cooper.
REVIEW: Compared to other rock bios “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” is unlikely; as unlikely as Bruce Springsteen following up his biggest hit to date, the upbeat, jangly “Hungry Heart,” with the stark, downbeat “Nebraska.”
Set in the early eighties in the weeks and months after the close of the phenomenally success tour for “The River,” the film begins as a standard rock biography. Springsteen’s manager John Landau (Jeremy Strrong) is the buffer between a record company hungry for another record, preferably laden with big hits, and an artist (Jeremy Allen White) struggling to find himself in this wake of fame that came with his new, widespread success and the pressure to “hit it out of the park again.”
Springsteen’s journey “to find the real among the noise” leads him to a rented house in Colts Neck, New Jersey. Equipped with only a lo-fi Teac Tascam 144 four-track cassette recorder, he records the sparse demos inspired by the meditative crime drama “Badlands” intertwined with memories from his troubled childhood. The songs are stark, introspective and the polar opposite of what the record company is expecting.
“Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” is a quiet, minor chord portrait of an artist at a crossroads. But what begins as a story of an artist struggling with the pressures of fame and a greedy record company soon turns to the fight for artistic integrity as depression and isolation take hold.
“I know who you are,” says a car salesman, recognizing the rock star. “That makes one of us,” Springsteen replies with a straight face.
Director Scott Cooper, who also wrote the script based on the 2023 book “Deliver Me from Nowhere” by Warren Zanes, avoids most, but not all, of the rock bio genre’s trappings to deliver a brooding character study of a man battling depression as he is cut loose from the world he came from and thrust into an uncertain future.
It sounds like a cliché, but Jeremy Allen White channels Springsteen. His singing voice doesn’t quite match the Boss’s power, but in the film’s contemplative moments, and there are many, White is not afraid to leave space around the performance. His take on Springsteen is a vibe, as reliant on the character’s unspoken moments as it is on what the character actually says.
The movie does rock out from time to time with some randomly inserted concert footage (While “Born in the U.S.A.” was written for the “Nebraska” album, the inclusion of the full-band rave-up here may please fans but feels out of place) but works best when it focusses on White’s stripped-down performance.
The film is really a solo act.
The singer’s relationships are given a short shrift. His courtship of Jersey girl Faye Romano (Odessa Young) is underwritten and, considering how large The E Street Band looms in Springsteen’s mythology, they are barely a presence here. It’s in his bond with longtime manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) and the complicated relationship with his father (Stephen Graham) that he shows the kind of emotional vulnerability that lies at the heart of the performance.
“Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” is a solemn movie that drags in its latter section as Springsteen fights for the release of the starkly poetic “Nebraska.” The tortured artist’s insistence on musical integrity is commendable but feels repetitious by the film’s end.
Still, Cooper’s focus on the artist’s path, on resilience, on forgiveness and not simply Springsteen’s Wikipedia page, is admirable.
Hot on the heels of family-friendly cartoons like Zootopia, The Secret Life of Pets and Finding Dory comes an animated movie that definitely isn’t for the whole family… unless it’s the Manson Family.
The high concept of Seth Rogen’s NSFW Sausage Party was, I think, best summed up by twitter user @ByChrisSmith who wrote, “So that Sausage Party trailer… Toy Story for food with swears?”
It’s the kind of food porn you won’t see on the Food Network. “We started to think ‘What if food had feelings?’ said Rogen after a sneak preview at the South By Southwest Film Festival. “That really is what inspired the whole idea: What if food thought one thing happened and discovered another thing happened?”
The story begins at a supermarket called Shopwell’s. Frank the Sausage (voice of Rogen), his hot dog bun girlfriend Brenda (Kristen Wiig) and all the other foods—including Mr. Grits (Craig Robinson), a tomato (Paul Rudd) and Teresa the Taco (Salma Hayek)—live in hope that one day a customer will choose them. When they find out what happens after the customer takes them home, however, they fight to avoid their fate.
R-rated and raunchy, Rogen says he showed an early cut of the film to Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen. “Sausage Party appalled him in some ways,” adding that Cohen, cinema’s reigning Prince of Provocation, called the movie “the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Someone who might not have been surprised by Sausage Party is Ralph Bakshi, a legendary animator who once said, “None of my pictures were anything I could ever take my mother to see. You know it’s working if you’re making movies you don’t want to your mother to see.”
Bakshi began his career his career in traditional animation, working for Terrytoons, home to cartoon characters like Heckle and Jeckle and Mighty Mouse but left television to make first animated film to receive an X-rating from the MPAA. Loosely based on a character created by cartoonist Robert Crumb, who later disavowed the film, 1972s Fritz the Cat is a trippy counterculture flick about a streetwise feline who smokes dope and has run ins with the Hell’s Angels and the Black Panthers. Extremely controversial—New York Times critic Vincent Canby wrote, “[there’s] something to offend just about everyone”—it became the first independent animated film to gross more than $100 million at the box office.
More adult animation came with the R-rated Heavy Metal. An anthology made up of eight stories bound together by an intergalactic traveller described as the sum of all evil, the movie’s tagline promises to take audiences “beyond the future into a universe you’ve never seen before. A universe of mystery. A universe of magic. A universe of sexual fantasies. A universe of awesome good. A universe of terrifying evil.” Rotten Tomatoes calls the movie “sexist, juvenile, and dated,” but says it “makes up for its flaws with eye-popping animation and a classic, smartly-used soundtrack.”
Both Fritz the Cat and Heavy Metal were successful enough to spawn sequels. The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat and Heavy Metal 2000 both tried and failed to recapture the success of the originals. When asked if there might be a sequel to Sausage Part Rogen said, “What’s better than one sausage? That would be dope. All we do are franchises now.”
“Sausage Party,” the new animated film for adults from Seth Rogen, is the kind of food porn you won’t see on the Food Network. The high concept of this NSFW cartoon is, I think, best summed up by twitter user @ByChrisSmith who wrote, “So that Sausage Party trailer… ‘Toy Story’ for food with swears?” It’s that for sure—don’t take the kids—but it’s more than just a one-joke double entendre about wieners and buns.
The story begins at a supermarket called Shopwell’s. While on the store’s shelves Frank the Sausage (voice of Rogen) and his hot dog bun girlfriend Brenda (Kristen Wiig) live in hope that one day they will ascend to the “Great Beyond” and finally consummate their relationship. “When a bun this fresh is into you,” says Frank, “all you say is when.”
After a jar of Honey Mustard (Danny McBride) is returned to the store he relays horrifying stories about what actually happens to food on the outside. When they are finally chosen, ie: thrown into a shopping cart by the “gods,” Honey Mustard sets them off on an existential journey when he leaps out of the cart. “There ain’t no way I’m going back,” he screams as he splats on the floor. Left in the grocery aisle, Frank and Brenda, along side Sammy Bagel Jr. (Edward Norton doing his best Woody Allen impression) and a Middle Eastern pastry named Lavash (David Krumholtz), try to find out if the gods really are the bloodthirsty animals Honey Mustard described in grim detail. Outside Shopwell’s Frank’s friends—like the hapless Barry Sausage (Michael Cera)—try and make their way back to safety on the store’s shelves.
Is “Sausage Party” OK for kids? Let’s get this out of the way first. It looks like a children’s flick. The wieners are adorable and the other characters—including Mr. Grits (Craig Robinson) and Teresa del Taco (Salma Hayek)—look like they wouldn’t be out of place in a movie like “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,” but make no mistake, this is not for the little ones. Why? I can sum it up in three words: used talking condom. And that is the least of the adult material. This is über-NSFW and will likely blister the ears of anyone not accustomed to Rogen’s liberal use of the seven words you can never say on television.
So, no children, but will adults like this? It depends on how adult you want to be. The film isn’t as funny as you might expect, given its pedigree. Written by the team behind the very amusing “The Night before” and “This is the End,” it is intermittently hilarious but as often as not it relies on juvenile outrageousness rather than actual wit. The idea of cursing bagels and sexualized tacos quickly wears thin but it is the film’s sheer audaciousness that keeps it interesting. A treatise on everything from cultural relations to gen pop’s tendency to take the easy way out, it’s a timely look at Trump Time, the unique moment in our history when belief outdoes facts. The food items are so pliable that the words to their national anthem, a wild psalm to celebrate the “gods” written by Disney stalwart Alan Menken, change as political affiliations change. “Today was there a verse about exterminating juice?” asks Firewater (Bill Hader).
“Sausage Party,” with all its unhinged humour may be the most subversive movie of the Trump candidacy. There are no walls here, just the barrier of a somewhat self-indulgent, silly story that values cussing as much as the jokes. On the plus side, however, it relishes its ideas and there is no expiration date on its message of unity over division.
