Bruce Springsteen thrilled the New York Film Festival crowd taking the stage after the NY premiere of Deliver Me From Nowhere, thanking the director and cast, especially Jeremy Allen White for “playing a much better looking version of me.”
Director Scott Cooper introduced Springsteen who entered with guitar and delivered a moving version of Land Of Hope And Dreams to a standing ovation.
“These days we have daily events reminding us of the fact that we’re living through these particularly dangerous times. I spent my life on the road, moving around the world as kind of a musical ambassador for America, you know … trying to measure the distance between American reality, where we’ve often fallen short of our ideals,” Springsteen said. “But for a lot of folks out there, she continues to be a land of hope and dreams, not of fear or divisiveness or government censorship or hatred.”
Cooper also welcomed Jeremy Strong, who played Springsteen’s longtime manager and co-producer Jon Landau along with the real Jon Landau. Disney CEO Bob Iger was in the house to support the 20th Century Studios release, which world premiered at Telluride.
The film — see Deadline review – adapted from Warren Zanes’s 2023 best-selling book is set at an early-’80s crossroads in Springsteen’s career. Negotiating the transformative waves of his rising fame and personal depression, he crafted the intensely personal acoustic songs that would become his album Nebraska at the same time he was recording the demos for Born in the U.S.A., which launched him to global superstardom.
