When it was first announced last year that The Bear star Jeremy Allen White would be playing Bruce Springsteen in a forthcoming biopic, I was skeptical. I love Jeremy Allen White, and I love Bruce Springsteen, but something about the combination of the two felt…off. Maybe it was that White doesn’t really physically resemble Springsteen that much, or maybe it felt a little too much like stunt casting in the wake of Timothée Chalamet’s performance as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, as if Hollywood was just rounding up hot, young actors and pairing them up with beloved classic rock icons and trying to find something that might work.
I’m here today to tell you that was incredibly dumb, and I’m totally sold now. The first trailer for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere dropped this morning, and it’s obvious from the clips of White that he completely nails the Boss’s mannerisms. Like Chalamet with Dylan, White faces an extremely difficult task with Springsteen: he’s gotta sound enough like Springsteen to be recognizable, but not so much that it sounds like he’s doing a cheesy impression. If the trailer is any indication, he somehow managed to thread that needle.
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From the electric to the downright cringe, we ranked every musical biopic from this centuryThe fact that White did his own singing as Springsteen and manages to sound as much like him as he does is also extremely impressive. (Does it make sense for the trailer for a movie about the making of Nebraska to end with Springsteen performing “Born to Run”? Probably not, but it’s worth it to see the spot-on way a sweaty White captures Springsteen’s onstage persona.) And beyond White, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere has a stacked cast that includes Succession‘s Jeremy Strong as Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau, Stephen Graham as his father and Gaby Hoffmann as his mother.
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere will hit theaters on Oct. 24. You can check out the trailer below.
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