Jeremy Allen White is in talks to play Bruce Springsteen in a biopic in development focused on the making of the music icon’s 1982 album Nebraska.
The film is being produced by The Gotham Group and producers Ellen Goldsmith-Vein and Eric Robinson, alongside former Netflix Films chairman Scott Stuber. it is based on the recent Warren Zanes book Deliver Me From Nowhere, a person familiar with the situation told MovieMaker.
A24 is also in talks to take part in the film. The studio released White’s latest film, The Iron Claw, about the seemingly cursed Von Erich wrestling dynasty. White starred as Kerry Von Erich.
Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen?
Jeremy Allen White is best known for The Bear, the restaurant drama series from FX on Hulu in which he stars as Carmy Berzatto, a world-renowned chef who leaves his Michelin-starred restaurant to take over his late brother’s failing Chicago sandwich shop. The actor, 32, recently won the Emmy award for outstanding lead actor in a comedy series at the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards for his role in The Bear.
Scott Cooper, whose films include Out of the Furnace, Hostiles and the recent Pale Blue Eye, is in talks to write and direct, and Springsteen is also involved, MovieMaker has learned. However, no official deals have been reached with talent just yet.
Zane spoke to several people, including Springsteen, about his book, which looks at the artist’s life after the release of his popular 1980 album The River.
His follow-up, Nebraska, wasa series of dark and melancholic songs he recorded alone in his bedroom on a four-track cassette recorder. Its tracks include “Atlantic City” and “Nebraska,” which was inspired by the 1973 movie Badlands, directed by Terrence Malick.
Springsteen has been very open about the fact that the “the soundscape for Nebraska really came from Badlands” — which is about a 15-year old girl named Holly (Sissy Spacek) who goes on a killing spree with Kit (Martin Sheen).
When Holly first appears in the film, she is expertly twirling a baton — just like the girl Springsteen describes at the start of “Nebraska”:
I saw her standing on her front lawn just twirling her baton /Me and her went for a ride, sir, and ten innocent people died / From the town of Lincoln, Nebraska, with a sawed-off .410 on my lap / Through to the badlands of Wyoming I killed everything in my path.
In Badlands, they’re in Montana, not Wyoming, but you get the idea.
This would not be the first movie made with Springsteen in mind. The 2019 musical drama Blinded By the Light directed by Gurinder Chadha featured archival footage of the musician, following the story of a teenage boy in 1987 who finds himself through Springsteen’s songs.
Also in 2019, Springsteen directed a documentary called Western Stars that features him playing the songs of his album of the same name. It premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival.
Springsteen has also appeared as an actor in movies and TV shows, including playing Giuseppe “Joey the Undertaker” Tagliano in Lilyhammer, starring Sopranos star Steven Van Zandt, who is also a member of Springsteen’s E Street Band. Van Zandt was one of the people interviewed in Zanes’ book Deliver Me From Nowhere.
Springsteen also made a cameo in the 2020 music drama Broken Poet, directed by Emilio Ruiz Barrachina, about a Rolling Stone journalist who goes to Paris to investigate rumors that a rock star who was believed to have died decades earlier might still be alive.
Main Image: Jeremy Allen White in 2023, Shutterstock, Bruce Springsteen in “I’m on Fire” music video.
Editor’s note: Corrects typos and headline.
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