Today is Election Day in the United States, which means that I’m thinking about what everyone else is thinking about: Bruce Springsteen paying a visit to Jeremy Allen White on the set of his biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere.
The two were spotted embracing on a Bayonne, New Jersey set made up to look like a car dealership. In these shots, we see past and present Bruce Springsteen style eras collide in real time. The real Springsteen, now 75, has firmly settled into elevated, quasi- workwear rich-old-guy style: a red plaid flannel jacket, faded jeans, Ray Bans, and lace-up leather boots. White as Young Springsteen, meanwhile, is in black Levis, a black leather jacket, and heeled Western boots. Proof that the Boss’s fits, much like his songs, are timeless. Also proof that White looks uncannily like Springsteen! I can hear the mournful harmonica kicking in already.
Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin
Bobby Bank
The film, based on the Warren Zanes book Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, is directed by Scott Cooper and focuses on the Boss writing his tormented 1982 solo album. (Which, I’m legally obligated to remind you, was written in a Snoopy notebook.) As for the car dealership part: While Springsteen famously admitted in his memoir that he didn’t even know how to drive a car when he wrote “Racing in the Streets,” rest assured that he was a licensed driver by the Nebraska era.
Jeremy Strong and Jeremy Allen White are also maximizing their joint Jeremy slay in this production. Strong, who is playing longtime Springsteen manager Jon Landau, was also present for the Boss’s set visit. (He already has a stamp of approval from critic and real-life Landau ex-wife Janet Maslin.)
For better or worse, the music biopic has become an inescapable proving ground for young stars these days: we’ve had Austin Butler as Elvis in Elvis, Jacob Elordi as Elvis in Priscilla, Kingsley Ben-Adir in Bob Marley: One Love, and Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse in Back to Black, and Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown.
Also inescapable? Seeing a flood of photos from the set with the star in period costume. But there’s something that feels very Springsteen, always the worker, about actually showing up to the set of your own biopic.
