Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen

Just as A Complete Unknown escaped the dreary conventionality of cradle-to-grave music biopics by surveying the nascent period in the stardom of its unknowable subject, Bob Dylan, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere makes affecting gains by focusing on the Artist as a Depressed Young Man. Which is not to say Scott Cooper’s Bruce Springsteen portrait is a downer. If you’re looking to celebrate the anthemic hits of blue-collar New Jersey’s favorite son, this highly personal movie might not meet your requirements. But serious fans — particularly those who admire the lo-fi 1982 album Nebraska — should connect with the intimate drama.

Released between the seminal 1980 double album The River and the definitive leap to superstardom four years later with Born in the U.S.A., Nebraska was a bold career move and not the fresh crop of Top 10 singles for which Columbia Records likely was hoping. A thematically dark acoustic collection built from a DIY recording, it was inspired by Flannery O’Connor stories, Terrence Malick’s Badlands, late ‘50s spree killer Charles Starkweather and Springsteen’s unaddressed childhood trauma.

All this presents Jeremy Allen White with something of a challenge in the title role, and though his resemblance to Springsteen is minimal, he digs deep into the musician’s brooding interiority during a low period that ultimately resulted in him seeking overdue treatment for depression. He plays the rugged character, dressed in his uniform of plaid flannel shirt, jeans and leather jacket, as a man physically burdened by his demons.

Early on, Cooper slips in an exhilarating performance interlude with Bruce and the E Street Band tearing up the Cincinnati Coliseum stage in 1981 with “Born to Run.” (White’s vocals are mixed with Springsteen’s in the live performances.) But this is an altogether more introspective movie than that scene suggests. Coming down from the massive 12-month River Tour, Bruce is 32 and lost. He tells his longtime friend and manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong): “I just need to get home and slow things down a little.”

Jon secures him a rental in a quiet, woodsy part of Colts Neck, N.J., where he tries to figure out what to do with himself. Occasionally, he revisits his bar-band days at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, but while Columbia is pushing Jon to steer him onto the next “Hungry Heart,” Bruce is more preoccupied with feeling estranged from the world he knows best.

Even a tentative spark of romance with single-parent diner server Faye (Odessa Young), the younger sister of a schoolmate he struggles to remember, becomes difficult for him to sustain in some of the most poignant scenes.

The rabbit hole of memory opens up when Bruce drives by his childhood home, now a sad, dilapidated residence in a working-class neighborhood, his parents having relocated to California. But the fear he often felt around his volatile father Doug (Stephen Graham), a drunk with violent mood swings, and the anxiety of his protective mother Adele (Gaby Hoffman) are still very much with him.

Cooper switches to black-and-white for flashbacks, a well-worn memory device that works here thanks to longtime DP collaborator Masanobu Tayayanagi’s textured visuals and a persuasive sense of the milieu. Young actor Matthew Anthony Pellicano Jr.’s vulnerability as preteen Bruce also makes those episodes come alive — a scene in which his dad takes him to see The Night of the Hunter is especially memorable. And Graham (superb in Adolescence) subtly introduces redeeming nuances that will deepen in some genuinely moving father-and-son scenes toward the end.

To some extent, this is a making-of-an-album movie, a significant part of it spent on Bruce’s time writing and recording songs on a four-track tape recorder in his bedroom at the Colts Neck house. Working only with guitar tech Mike Batlan (a straggly-haired Paul Michael Hauser), he lays down bare-bones versions of songs originally intended to be fleshed out in the studio with the E Street crew. But in frustrating sessions at storied Hell’s Kitchen recording studio Power Station, Bruce feels the band is overpowering the songs and insists on paring everything right back to basics, mastering the album directly from the tapes, imperfections and all.

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The insights into the recording process will be fascinating to anyone interested in how music is made, even if the push-pull between Bruce and engineer Chuck Plotkin (Marc Maron) to get the spare, echoey sound he wants isn’t the most dramatically dynamic material. But there’s humor in the response of Columbia exec Al Teller (David Krumholtz) to Jon’s news: “He’s putting out a fucking folk album?!”

While the secondary characters could have been more developed, there’s a tender sense of people trying to protect Bruce, even Young’s Faye, who has wrenching scenes in which she’s as concerned for him as she is for her own heartache.

Landau feels like Strong playing to type, but Jon’s loyalty is touching, acting as a buffer between Bruce and the CBS suits. He also shares his worries at home with his wife (Grace Gummer) that the Nebraska songs are dealing with disturbing issues of guilt which he feels unable to talk about with his friend. In a piercing moment later in the film, Bruce tells him, “I don’t think I can outrun this anymore.” Jon’s pain as he confesses he feels ill-equipped to help is almost as palpable.

In addition to Graham, Hoffman also makes a strong impression as Adele. Her loyalty to her troubled husband despite everything he put her through suggests a grounded stoicism probably not uncommon in midcentury wives to whom the idea of leaving was unthinkable.

The good-looking production delivers notably in terms of sound. A Power Station scene in which the E Street Band takes a first run at “Born in the U.S.A.” is a roof-raiser, though the music in general is less prominent than might be expected. At times, the bio-drama feels emotionally underpowered, but there’s melancholy beauty in the fact that Springsteen felt the need to put aside surefire hits like “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Glory Days” and “I’m on Fire” until he got Nebraska out of his system.

The decision to portray the man not as a Rock God but as a fragile human being who’s also an uncompromising artist gives Deliver Me From Nowhere a solemn integrity. Some will argue that key songs from Nebraska are missing (my longtime favorite, the hypnotic “State Trooper,” is heard only in passing). And anyone eager for a detailed track-by-track study of the album should turn to Warren Zanes’ book, which served as the basis for Cooper’s screenplay.

What the film and White’s agonized, internalized performance amply convey is the state of mind from which one of the most important albums in the Springsteen canon — the one he considers his best — materialized. Movies about depression are tough, but fans invested in the subject during a transitional moment of artistic and personal catharsis will be rewarded.