Over the past decade, there has been a deluge of big Hollywood movies about rock stars, among them 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody, 2019’s Rocketman and 2022’s Elvis, each of which made a fortune at the box office and was Oscar-nominated, with Bohemian Rhapsody winning four little gold men, including best actor, and Rocketman taking home one. Those films certainly addressed dark aspects of their subjects’ personal lives, but they were essentially jukebox musicals, excuses to showcase the greatest hits from across their subjects’ careers. That, for better or worse, depending on what you’re looking for, is not what you should expect from Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. And it will be interesting to see how that goes over with the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Scott Cooper’s film, which stars two-time Emmy winner Jeremy Allen White (Carmy from The Bear) as The Boss, had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival’s Werner Herzog Theater on Friday night, with Bruce Springsteen himself in attendance. And much like the 2023 book from which Cooper adapted it, Warren Zanes’ excellent Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, it focuses almost entirely on one of the darkest times in Springsteen’s life. In short, Springsteen is as much a film about depression as it is a film about being a rock star (“I know who you are,” a stranger says to Springsteen at one point, to which he replies, “Well that makes one of us”), and in that way, oddly enough, it’s sort of a Nebraska of its genre.

In the early ’80s, Springsteen was a few years removed from his breakthrough album Born to Run, which heralded the arrival of a great artist and storyteller who focused on albums rather than singles. But the son of Freehold, New Jersey, was not yet rock star-rich, having poured an inordinate amount of own money into prior recording sessions to satisfy his perfectionism. He was terrified of encroaching mega-fame. And he was increasingly plagued by mental illness, something that had afflicted other members of his family — including and especially his father, whose behavior toward him and his mother, back when he was a kid, still haunted him — and which contributed to his inability to maintain healthy romantic relationships.

As Springsteen’s protective manager Jon Landau (Succession Emmy winner and The Apprentice Oscar nominee Jeremy Strong) fended off pressure from his record label to put out more music as soon as possible, and shortly after Springsteen began dating a lovely single mother named Faye Romano (Odessa Young), he began isolating himself to a greater degree than usual, immersing himself in dark literature (Flannery O’Connor) and films (Badlands), and recording demos, from the seclusion of his own bedroom, on audio cassettes. In making the demos, his initial intention was to figure out songs at home and then share them with his band, as opposed to bleeding time and money while trying to figure things out during studio sessions. But he ultimately fell in love with their pared-down, acoustic, imperfect sound, and insisted on releasing them in that form, which met great resistance from label execs.

As someone who recently did a months-long, deep-dive, immersion on all things Springsteen ahead of a 75-minute interview with the man himself for my podcast, I tremendously appreciate the film’s great attention to detail and accuracy. But I also wonder if casual fans of Springsteen, of which I was before that undertaking made me a super fan, will care about that as much as wanting to see a depiction of the man they know from the nearly half-century since Nebraska. Also, given that the central love story of the film is not the one between Springsteen and Romano, but the one between Springsteen and Landau, I wish the film had addressed the roots of the latter relationship: in May 1974, when Landau, then a music critic, saw a pre-Born to Run Springsteen perform in Boston, and then wrote a piece in which he declared, “I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen,” which gave Springsteen a boost of confidence that he badly needed at the time.

In any event, one thing that nobody can take issue with is the quality of the three central performances in the film. As the lead, White projects Springsteen’s soulfulness and swagger, and capably does his own singing. And in supporting roles, Strong gives another transformative turn, this time as the anti-Kendall Roy, while Young is charming and vulnerable. All three will be strong contenders for Oscar nominations, and I suspect that the film itself, along with Cooper’s direction and screenplay, will be right there with them.