[Warning: This reaction to Scott Cooper‘s Deliver Me From Nowhere is crude and indelicate, but it’s honest.]
I fucking hated hanging with Jeremy Allen White‘s Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere, which I caught earlier this evening.
Okay, I didn’t “hate” him exactly, but I certainly couldn’t accept White as Springsteen. I kept seeing and hearing the Bear guy, and he wouldn’t stop with the glum morose vibes…he kept “acting” at everyone with those big soulful eyes and that big beak nose. It’s not Bruce…I can’t buy into this.
Why was I touched and fascinated by Casey Affleck‘s miserable grief monkey in Manchester By the Sea, and yet annoyed and bitter about spending time with White?
When the mostly negative critical verdicts came down and the opening-weekend earnings were decidedly weak, I felt sorry for White and Cooper and Springsteen himself. My heart went out.
But now that I’ve seen it, you know what? This movie got exactly the response that it deserved. Because it’s slow as molasses and a fucking gloomhead downer.
Plus Masanobu Takayanagi‘s cinematography is way, WAY too dark. Overwhelming blackitude and enveloping shadows. The whole movie happens inside a black velvet fuck-me closet. It’s covered in Nestle’s chocolate syrup.
Plus I hated the overweight Stephen Graham, who plays Bruce’s boozing asshole dad. Ditto the funereal black-and-white 1950s flashback sequences. I even hated the low-rent band at the Stone Pony, and that long-haired lead singer in particular…fuck you!
Even the deep copper color of the wall-to-wall carpets in Springsteen’s Colts Neck rental bothered me.
Steady, competent performances: (a) the always on-target Jeremy Strong (as Bruce’s manager Jon Landau), (b) Odessa Young as Faye Romano, a waitress and single mom whom Springsteen fiddles around with on an absentee-fuckbuddy basis (I felt instant empathy and sorrow for this poor woman), (c) the long-haired, needlessly obese Paul Walter Hauser as a recording engineer bro.
But White is really fucking dull. I don’t like his company, and he mumbles. He’s just moping and moping and moping some more. Mope-a-dope. Me to White: “Fuck you, you fucking downhead! You’re bohhrrring!”
Friendo: Is venting like this good for your health?
HE: The movie is the problem, not me. Graham is too fucking fat. “Sit on my lap”?? Fuck these guys. But double especially fuck Takayanagi and Cooper for going with their noirish, melted black licorice color-and-lighting scheme.