THE DARK SIDE
Not much information about the film is available as of this writing, save for a trailer that premiered July 18 and a release date of October 24, 2025. Other than that, all we know is that Scott Cooper is directing, Jeremy Allen White plays Springsteen and Jeremy Strong plays Jon Landau, and that shooting has taken place in various New Jersey locations including Freehold, where Springsteen grew up, and the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, where he launched his career and has returned to throughout the years.
My first thought was, why make a movie about recording Nebraska? Then I read Warren Zanes' book Deliver Me From Nowhere, on which the movie is based.
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It's a dark story.
Zanes was inspired to write his book, which came out in 2023, after reading Springsteen's autobiography, Born to Run, and noticing that the chapter on the making of Nebraska was surprisingly short.
Zanes tells me: 'That section about Nebraska blows by in three pages. I'm thinking, 'There's no way.' That was a major turning point. I felt there was more to the story.'
Nebraska, a mostly acoustic, starkly literary 10-track imperfect masterpiece, features downtrodden and at times downright evil characters, such as Joe Roberts and his criminal brother in 'Highway Patrolman,' the estranged son searching for his father in 'My Father's House,' the poor siblings in 'Mansion on the Hill,' and the serial killer Charles Starkweather. And the LP came two years after Springsteen's fastest-selling album to date, The River.
Between December 17, 1981 and January 3, 1982, Springsteen recorded 17 demo tracks in the back bedroom of a rental house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, a 12-minute drive from Freehold. Sitting on the edge of his bed with his Gibson J-200, a harmonica, a couple of mics, and a consumer-grade TEAC four-track cassette player, the songs he put to tape were meant to be sketches he would teach the E. Street Band to play for the final, full-ensemble, studio versions.
Seven of the tracks he did save for Born in the U.S.A.
The other 10, for reasons he couldn't explain at the time, kept calling to him, begging for attention. So he quickly mixed the songs through a Gibson Echoplex, then mastered them onto the water-logged Panasonic boombox he had sitting on his couch, which, according to Zanes' book, had miraculously come back to life despite falling out of a canoe.
When Landau first heard the cassette, he told Zanes he was concerned 'on a friendship level' due to the dark, sinister nature of the songs. Up to that point, Springsteen's songs were about redemption. The tape Landau heard, however, was stark and violent, lonely and sad; the opposite of Springsteen's signature writing style.
Springsteen spent weeks in the studio trying to turn those demos into full-blown E. Street tracks, complete with Clarence Clemons' signature saxophone sound. According to Zane's book, while others thought the sessions were going well, Springsteen did not. ''Every time I tried to make the recordings better, I lost my characters,' he told Zane. The songs—the ones on the cassette he continually carried around in the back pocket of his jeans —as if by some mystical force wouldn't allow it.
Springsteen released Nebraska on September 30, 1982 with very little fanfare. No American singles. No tour. No photos of him on the cover; just a black and white image of a desolate, rural highway, taken from the dashboard of a car. A now insanely iconic album cover.
'He's just had his first No.1 record, and his first top 10 single. He's poised to go big. No one around him is making a decision to go 'lo-fi' in the wake of their first No.1 album,' says Zanes.
'You get this color from the TEAC 144, and then you get a layer from the boombox they mixed down to, which had water damage, and then they run everything through an Echoplex, which simulates that early Sun Records slap back,' Zanes tells me.
Fans were confused at first. But once they listened to the songwriting, unparalleled to anything he'd released before, it resonated in such a deep, emotional way that more than 40 years later, 20th Century Studios is making a film about it.
The imperfections of Nebraska is a reflection of the imperfection of Springsteen's early life. Unresolved trauma from his childhood seeped into the album.
As Zanes explains, that's what's so compelling. 'He had trauma in his past that he was either going to contend with or it was going to contend with him.'
That stemmed mainly from his father, Douglas, who had a bad temper, struggled with depression, was an alcoholic, and suffered from mental illness that would later be diagnosed as schizophrenia. Because Douglas couldn't keep a job, the Springsteen household moved in with Bruce's grandparents shortly after his sister Virginia was born in 1951. The house was in complete disrepair with only one functional room. During the five years they stayed there, Springsteen describes in Zanes' book how he was given free rein to do whatever he wanted. No discipline at all. 'It destroyed me and it made me. At the same time,' Springsteen said.
It turns out that the making of Nebraska was like turning on a valve of a darkness he didn't realize he had inside of him, a depression that caused him to have a breakdown around the time of the album's release.
'When someone goes back to a difficult childhood, exploring the facts of what went down is not enough,' Zanes tells me. 'You have to dig to find out what those facts mean to you as an adult facing trouble in your life. Not that he did this on a conscious level. He didn't know at the outset what he was going back into.'
Springsteen started going to therapy. He began working out, transforming himself into 'The Boss.' Two years later he released Born in the U.S.A., which made him a superstar.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
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