Director Scott Cooper is said to be working on a biopic tackling legendary singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen’s recording of his 1982 landmark album, “Nebraska.”
Roger Friedman’s sources are saying that Springsteen has been consulting with Cooper on the film and that the project seems to be “moving along.” No casting has been made. I don’t even know if the film has a distributor, but I sure hope it gets made.
The “Nebraska” story might just be the most fascinating time period of Springsteen’s career. During that time, the singer was going through a severe bout of depression and anxiety — he just didn’t know it. He created art through it, battling his inner demons by recording the spooky “Nebraska” tracks with a home recorder, alone in a bedroom, a “matter of months from a breakdown.”
In his memoir “Born to Run,” Springsteen writes of that time: “My depression is spewing like an oil spill …Its black sludge is threatening to smother every last living part of me.”
I did some digging after Friedman’s story broke and learned that the film might be based off of Warren Zanes’ “Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.” Cooper would be writing the screenplay, adapting Zanes’ tackling of Springsteen’s psyche during that time.
So it goes, one of the outtakes that emanated from the Nebraska bedroom sessions turned out to be a song called “Born in the USA.” A few years later, Springsteen would go on to re-record it, in a proper studio, with the E-Street Band, and the rest is the stuff of rock and roll history.
Cooper is coming off 2022’s Edgar Allen Poe Film, “The Pale Blue Eye.” His other directing credits include “Crazy Heart,” “Black Mass,” “Hostiles,” and “Out of the Furnace” — coincidentally, or not, Cooper admitted he was obsessively listening to “Nebraska” while writing ‘Furnace.’