They Wrote the Songs
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
Blue Moon

Miles David Moore

It is difficult to imagine two people—let alone two songwriters—more different in style, appearance, and personality than Bruce Springsteen and Lorenz Hart.  Just as their songs were different, so were their reactions when they faced, as most of us do, a horrible dark night of the soul.  Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere and Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon present them at precise points in time, when they confronted professional and personal crises.

Deliver Me from Nowhere—taken by Cooper from the book by Warren Zanes—begins in 1957 with a black-and-white sequence showing eight-year-old Bruce (Matthew Anthony Pellicano) in a bar trying to persuade his alcoholic father Douglas (Stephen Graham) to come home at the behest of his mother Adele (Gaby Hoffman).  That night, Bruce is in his bed listening to a savage fight between his parents.  He huddles terrified as he hears his father’s heavy tread advancing toward his door.

Suddenly, we are startled by an explosion of color and sound: the story leaps forward to 1981 and Bruce’s performance at Riverside Stadium in Cincinnati, concluding a triumphal tour.  By all rights, Bruce (Jeremy Allen White) should be on top of the world, but something is clearly missing.

“I do know who you are,” says the salesman who sells Bruce his first-ever new car.

Bruce looks at him sadly.  “That makes one of us,” he says.

Bruce’s isolation is profound.  He has few friends: his manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), recording engineer Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser), home-town buddy Matt Delia (Harrison Sloan Gilbertson).  Steven Van Zandt and the other E Street Band members are nowhere in evidence, except on stage.  Bruce lives in a rented house a few miles from where he grew up, staring at the river view, desultorily leafing through Flannery O’Connor’s collected stories, working the TV remote.  One night he happens on a broadcast of Badlands—Terrence Malick’s movie based on the story of Charles Starkweather’s murderous rampage through Nebraska—and something clicks.

From this point, Deliver Me from Nowhere becomes the story of a great artist in the process of creation, and simultaneously in the process of reckoning with his past.   Working at home with Batlan and a four-track recorder, Bruce lays down the tracks for Nebraska, his most personal and mournful album.  Bruce becomes obsessed; he realizes the four-track tape is unreleasable, yet he hounds the engineers at Columbia to replicate the haunted, desolate sound of that tape in the finished recording.  Jon is worried about the dark tone of the new songs and what they say about Bruce’s mental state.  Nevertheless, he defends them against executives at Columbia Records, who want to scotch Nebraska in favor of a more commercial record that is also in the works—Born in the U.S.A.

Cooper intercuts the recording scenes with flashbacks to Bruce’s childhood.  Some are lyrical (running through a cornfield); more are horrific (Bruce taking a baseball bat to Doug to keep him from beating Adele).  It is always plain how Bruce’s past affects his present—not only his music, but his relationship with Faye Romano (Odessa Young), the sister of an old high-school friend.  Faye—an amalgam of several women Bruce dated during this time—simply can’t figure out where Bruce, who veers between ardency and coldness, is coming from.

Deliver Me from Nowhere is extremely well-made, yet I see why it wasn’t a hit.  Its tone is relentlessly downbeat.  Even at the end, when audiences could reasonably expect a little uplift, the last thing we see is Bruce walking away from the camera, with titles telling us about the overwhelming public reception for both Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A.  We hear about the triumphs, but we don’t see them.  We can quarrel with Cooper’s choices, but not with the general excellence of what we see on screen.  Deliver Me from Nowhere is brilliant in how it portrays Springsteen’s creative process, and how his depression fed his creativity.   The main theme of Springsteen’s work—the plight of working-class people ground down by an indifferent system—is the unspoken but obvious engine powering the plot.

The cast is exceptional.  We already know from The Bear that Jeremy Allen White is an expert at portraying brooding introspection, but we aren’t prepared for how deftly he captures both the look and sound of The Boss.  The supporting players are equally fine; Odessa Young is touching as a young woman trying to raise her small daughter and keep her head above water, and Jeremy Strong as Jon Landau is exactly the kind of friend we all want to have.

If Deliver Me from Nowhere begins with Bruce Springsteen at the start of his life, Blue Moon begins with Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) at the end of his, collapsing from pneumonia and alcoholism in a dark, rainy New York alley.  It then flashes back seven months, to the event in Hart’s life—the premiere of Oklahoma! on March 31, 1943—that precipitated his end.

Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) wanted his longtime partner Hart to collaborate with him on a musical version of the play Green Grow the Lilacs, but Hart thought the material too corny.  Rodgers then approached Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon
Delaney). 

It is apparent on opening night that Oklahoma! will be one of the greatest hits in Broadway history.  Hart still thinks the show is corny, and departs the show early to head for Sardi’s and the opening night party.

Hart is the first one there, except for his favorite bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and Morty Rifkin (Jonah Lees), a piano player in U.S. Army uniform.  (World War II, of course, is still raging.)  The balding, cigar-chomping Hart is so short he can barely see over the bar.  He grandly announces that he’s off the booze and orders Eddie not to serve him.  That resolve lasts for about five minutes.

Hart refers to himself as “omnisexual.”  Even as he attempts to flirt with a flower delivery boy, he rhapsodizes to Eddie about the girl he’s meeting that night—Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), a Yale design student, with whom he has been corresponding.

Hart is chatty, witty, bitchy.  He and Eddie trade quotes from the new hit movie, Casablanca.  He talks about the songs he wrote with Rodgers, including “Blue Moon,” their biggest hit, which he doesn’t like much.  Of Rodgers himself, he says, “Dick is a cold son of a bitch, but he can make a melody—levitate.”  He looks forward to resuming his partnership with Rodgers at the earliest possible opportunity.

Screenwriter Robert Kaplow, who based his screenplay in part on Hart’s letters to Weiland, took a lot of liberties.  It isn’t clear historically if the opening-night party for Oklahoma! was held at Sardi’s, or if Hart attended.  It is highly unlikely that E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy) attended the party, and a lead-pipe cinch that Hart didn’t give him the idea for Stuart Little.  It is also unlikely that Hammerstein attended the party with his brash 13-year-old protégé Stevie (Cillian Sullivan).  If you guessed that Stevie’s last name is Sondheim, give yourself a pat on the back.

No matter that Blue Moon is a near-total invention.  In presenting one of the most painful nights of Lorenz Hart’s life, Linklater and Kaplow give us an incisive portrait of Hart and his world.  That world is a small, exclusive pond where you are defined by your latest hit, and Hart, who has swum in it successfully for more than twenty years, suddenly finds himself drowning.

In quick succession, Hart’s hopes are dashed. When Rodgers appears, he is truly the cold son of a bitch Hart described, but he has a point: he says he needs a collaborator who doesn’t disappear for days at a time and isn’t drunk when he finally shows up.  He doesn’t cut Hart off completely—he asks for new lyrics for a revival of their 1927 hit A Connecticut Yankee—but he makes it plain that Hammerstein is his regular partner now.  Rodgers’ next project is an adaptation of Ferenc Molnar’s Liliom, which we now know as Carousel.  Again, it is too corny for Hart, but perfect for Hammerstein, who is as corny as Kansas in
August.

Hart’s romantic aspirations with Elizabeth fare even worse.  Never has the phrase, “I love you—but not that way,” sounded so cruel.

Blue Moon, despite taking place almost entirely inside Sardi’s, never seems stagey for one second.  The film seems utterly true to its place and time; Linklater, one of the most masterful, daring, and versatile filmmakers today, receives sovereign support from cinematographer Shane F. Kelly, production designer Susie Cullen, and costume designer Consolata Boyle. 

Cast members including Scott (who won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival), Qualley, and Cannavale are all splendid, but the cynosure—as he should be—is Hawke.  Hawke is arguably Linklater’s favorite actor; they have worked together in nine movies so far, including such masterpieces as Boyhood and the Before Sunrise trilogy.  Hawke underwent a remarkable physical transformation to play Hart, shaving his head to get the right comb-over look and using posture adjustments and special costumes to appear a foot shorter than he actually is.    But the physical aspect would mean nothing if the emotional aspect weren’t right, and Hawke nails it.  His Hart has always used his wit and talent as shields against the mockery and disregard of others.  By the end of Blue Moon, he finds his wit and talent can no longer protect him, and he is—to quote one of his own lyrics—a ship without a sail. 

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere and Blue Moon are fascinating glimpses into the lives of two of the greatest songwriters America has ever produced.  They also present fascinating contrasts in how people react to pain and despair.  Bruce Springsteen sought professional help, steadied his life course, and made his pain the basis of his art.  Lorenz Hart collapsed in a rain-soaked alley.  The first story is hearteningly instructive, the other sadly so.