In 1981, Bruce Springsteen was on a roll. After the release of the critically acclaimed and chart topping album The River and a sellout tour to large crowds, everyone (not least the record company) was eagerly anticipating the next big hit from the Boss.
However, there was a darkness on the edge of Bruce's metaphorical town. The tour had been physically and emotionally gruelling, and the long studio sessions for the previous album had eaten through all but $20,000 of his savings. He rented a house by a lake in the small town of Colts Neck and bought a simple four track cassette recorder, turning one of the unused bedrooms in the otherwise empty house into a home studio with the aid of his engineer Mike Batlan.
The plan was to work on demo recordings in advance of the studio sessions with the band but things took a darker turn. Bruce was evidently rattling around in the house on his own when he caught the movie Badlands on the TV. This led him to research the Starkweather spree killings that inspired the film, which he turned into a grim first person narrative murder ballad called Nebraska.
Other songs started to flow - tales of working class struggles and troubled people, evidently inspired by memories of his relationship with his damaged and abusive father (shown in black and white flashbacks). At one point he also starts listening to the song Frankie Teardrop by the band Suicide, which Mike Batlan advises him not to listen to on repeat.
Around this time he starts a tentative relationship with a young single mother called Faye that he meets after a gig at a local bar where he has been blowing off steam playing with old Jersey friends. This is a composite character created for the film, but it shows his difficulty in committing to any sort of lasting relationship at this time in his life.
As his mental health spirals and the recording sessions with the band are struggling (a stellar recording of Born in the USA being the one high point), he insists on putting out the lo-fi home recordings out as an album, warts and all. Fortunately his manager and producer Jon Landau saw where he was coming from and backed him in the face of record company scepticism to release the album Nebraska with zero fanfare (although having a sure fire hit in the bag probably helped).
That's pretty much the film, but it's a worthwhile watch mainly for the performances of Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen and Stephen Graham as his father, and the music which sees White recreating the feeling of those haunting recordings on Nebraska as well as the punch the air live performances in a couple of scenes.
