This is a thoughtful and at times rather listless film. It tries to get under the skin of Springsteen – to show the emotional ghosts and unresolved pain that fed into his writing, particularly the fraught relationship with his abusive father – but the film’s insights often feel oblique, tangential, and never fully earned.

The focus is on the making of Nebraska in 1982, much of it recorded in Springsteen’s house in New Jersey. The cassette tape demos are raw and technically too poor for release, so there are long debates about whether he should re-record them properly, or whether their imperfection is the very point – their purity, their authenticity. It’s an interesting dilemma, but the film keeps folding in half-developed strands that never quite go anywhere – including a subplot about Springsteen nearly appearing in a Paul Schrader film with Robert De Niro, which is dangled… then abandoned.

Curiously, the film invents a fictional girlfriend to embody and externalise his inner turmoil – she is affectionate, grounded, and loyal, but she also exists purely as a symbol. She’s left behind when Bruce heads west to California, and her purpose is clearly metaphorical rather than biographical – a reminder of the pain involved in severing one’s origins to begin the next chapter.

The film covers his childhood in flashback and then jumps directly to 1982, bypassing much of the rest of his life. Jeremy Allen White does a strong job capturing Springsteen’s reticence, awkwardness, and bruised sensitivity – but the film rarely lets him interact with other artists, collaborators or even peers. For a figure whose mythology has always been tied up with live performance and connection, it’s striking how isolating this portrait is.

The irony is sharp: at the very moment Springsteen was poised for global stadium domination, he makes a quiet, haunted, stark record about trauma, witness, pain and the America beneath the postcard image. But the film’s visual language and pacing often feel flatter than the themes deserve. There is a slight fetishistic over-focus on old tape recorders, cassette hiss, recording fidelity – and how ancient that all now feels.

There is value here in seeing Springsteen deconstructed not as a stadium god, but as someone in the middle of an identity fracture. Yet the film keeps threatening to say something profound about that – and never quite gets there.