Scott Cooper faces the icon not to renew its myth, but to verify its survival in silence. Where the biopic musical tends towards monumentalization, its gaze narrows until it coincides with the minimal act, the moment that precedes every legend. “Springsteen – Free me from nothing” observes the artist in the time of creation, in a house that becomes a refuge and a prison, a space of resonances rather than actions. The director does not stage the hero's parable but his intermittency: the moment in which the voice no longer finds a body and inspiration becomes material to be excavated.
The plot develops around the period in which Bruce Springsteen, isolated in the New Jersey studio, works on writing the album “Nebraska”. “Springsteen – Liberami dal niente” alternates black and white sequences, which retrace personal memories, the relationship with the family and the bond with one's homeland, with color sequences in which the respective songs take shape, born as musical elaborations of those memories. This mechanism, repeated throughout the film, builds a circular and reiterative structure, in which memory and musical creation are continuously intertwined: the composition becomes experience and the experience becomes music.
The narrative avoids the chronological linearity of biopic traditional and favors the internal scansion of artistic processes, in which every memory generates a song, every song reflects an experience and every tonal or chromatic variation underlines the psychological state of the artist.
Cooper favors a visual grammar of proximity and subtraction, in which medium shots and close-up shots focus attention on objects and surfaces (amplifiers, notebooks, instruments), transforming them into material indices of a thought that seeks form. Masanobu Takayanagi's photography shapes a dull and porous visual material: the light filters as a residue, never as a celebration, while the chromatic evolution from earthy heat to metallic grays accompanies a process of internal rarefaction, in which the external landscape dissolves in the protagonist's mind.
Depth of field becomes an instrument of hierarchy and articulation of distance: what is close transmits experience, what is further away remains a background voice, a silent parameter of truth.
In this context Jeremy Allen White builds Springsteen through the density of the body, the tension of the movements and the measure of the gestures, restoring a power that resists without exploding. The surrounding performers – Jeremy Strong, Stephen Graham, Carey Mulligan – do not act as simple support, but modulate the protagonist's psychological counterpoint, calibrating loneliness and isolation without resorting to melodramatic emphasis.
“Springsteen – Free me from nothing” thus manages to fit into the groove of biopic recent music without fully adhering to it: the film distances itself from spectacularization, showing the very human fragility of the protagonist and the urgency of his creative work. The management of time, memory and sound and visual matter transforms the act of composing into a shared experience with the spectator. Cooper constructs a work which, although placed between precise historical and biographical references (the “Nebraska” album, the first great depression, the relationship with the family, the home and rudimentary recording practice) maintains a universal scope, transforming the rocker's story into a meditation on loneliness, failure and responsibility towards oneself and towards others.
The strength of the film lies precisely in the tension between the concrete detail and the broader vision: each moment becomes a vehicle of understanding, while the iterative structure and alternating editing build a continuous flow between memory, music and reflection. Cooper thus transforms a biopic potentially conventional in a laboratory of observation of artistic creation, returning Springsteen not as an icon but as a man immersed in his own conflicts, in his own insecurities and in his own intuitions, in the silence and fatigue of a process which, even in its apparent simplicity, contains the complexity of talent.
05/11/2025
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
