Bruce Springsteen’s early-career stresses and anxieties are laid bare in the new biopic, “Deliver Me from Nowhere,” often manifesting onscreen in his fickle treatment of his girlfriend Faye Romano.
Australian actor Odessa Young stars opposite Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen’s love interest Faye, a young single mom from Springsteen’s hometown and fan of the budding rock star. In the film, Faye’s brother, an old classmate of Springsteen’s, introduces them after a show at The Stone Pony, a famous New Jersey rock club where Springsteen would regularly pop in for jam sessions in the ’70s and early ’80s.
In real life, The Boss probably met lots of girls at The Stone Pony — in fact, it’s where Springsteen met his future wife, Patti Scialfa — but never, to our knowledge, a girl named Faye Romano.
Young described her character in the film as an amalgamation of various women that Springsteen dated in his 20s and early 30s. Although Faye isn’t a real person, she represents a problematic dating pattern born of Springsteen’s fear of commitment at the time.
“This was about catching Bruce’s spirit; it was never about imitation,” writer and director Scott Cooper told Esquire, adding that Springsteen’s involvement in the film was “extensive.”
“I think Bruce was happy to hear me say that it was never about telling the whole story of Bruce Springsteen,” Cooper said. “It was about honoring that period: the stillness, the searching, the emotional honesty.”
Springsteen has said he ‘routinely and roughly failed perfectly fine women’
The main plotline in “Deliver Me from Nowhere” begins in 1981 with a reenactment of Springsteen’s concert at the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati.
Springsteen’s fame had sharply risen after a trio of commercial breakthroughs — 1975’s “Born to Run,” 1978’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” and 1980’s “The River” — and their associated tours. His live shows with the E Street Band had drawn critical acclaim; he was on the cusp of transitioning from local hero to superstar, and his label was itching for more radio hits.
However, as Springsteen wrote in his 2016 autobiography, also titled “Born to Run,” he found the post-tour downtime to be uncomfortably quiet and unsettling. He began fixating on his early childhood memories — particularly his fraught relationship with his father — and channeled them into a series of dark acoustic tracks, which eventually became his seminal 1982 album “Nebraska.”
Springsteen also said that at this time, he felt destined to lead a solitary life on the road, which made dating seem like a series of traps to escape.
“Family was a terrifying and compelling thought for me in 1980,” Springsteen wrote in his autobiography. “I only had my father’s experience to go by and no intimate knowledge of men who were at ease with family life. I didn’t trust myself to bear the burden of, the responsibility for, other lives, for that all-encompassing love.”
“My experience with relationships and love to that point all told me I wasn’t built for it. I grew very uncomfortable, very fast, with domestic life,” he continued. “Worse, it uncovered a deep-seated anger in me I was ashamed of but also embraced.”
In his 2012 biography “Bruce,” Peter Ames Carlin chronicles a series of failed trysts and overlapping relationships during Springsteen’s rise to fame: He was dating ballerina Karen Darvin when “Born to Run” was mastered and finalized; photographer Lynn Goldsmith told Carlin she considered herself “Bruce’s girlfriend” during the Darkness Tour in 1978; that same year, Springsteen began dating actor Joyce Hyser. Their relationship lasted several years, but unceremoniously fizzled by the time the River Tour wrapped in 1981.
“Honestly, there was nothing more important than his career. That’s what it came down to at the end of the day,” Hyser told Carlin. “His whole thing in those days was, ‘When I want to see you, you need to be here, and when I don’t, you need to be gone.'”
Indeed, without naming names, Springsteen confessed to much of the same in his autobiography.
“I’d routinely and roughly failed perfectly fine women over and over again,” he wrote.
“It was rarely the women themselves I was trying to get away from,” he continued. “I had many lovely girlfriends I cared for and who really cared for me. It was what they triggered, the emotional exposure, the implications of a life of commitments and family burdens.”
‘Deliver Me from Nowhere’ uses Faye as a foil to Springsteen’s restless lifestyle
Of all Springsteen’s documented girlfriends, the fictional Faye seems to most closely resemble Joy Hannan, whom Carlin describes in his biography as “a blessedly trouble-free college graduate from Little Silver, New Jersey.”
Springsteen and Hannan met at The Stone Pony — just as Springsteen meets Faye in the film — sometime in 1976. They dated for about two years, in between his relationships with Darvin and Goldsmith.
“I was his best buddy,” Hannan told Carlin. “We’d go to the beach, we’d hang out at the Pony, I took him sailing. He and I basically had fun.”
In “Deliver Me from Nowhere,” Springsteen takes Faye on a date to the Carousel House in Asbury. They also share scenes on the boardwalk and the beach with Faye’s young daughter, who evokes a lightness and childlike wonder that contrasts with Springsteen’s brooding portrayal.
Faye and her daughter seem to represent the peaceful, fun, familial life that Springsteen rejects in pursuit of his art — or, perhaps, rejects because he fears he doesn’t deserve it.
As the movie progresses and Springsteen becomes ever more fixated on his vision for “Nebraska,” his relationship with Faye fades into the background. When she tries to confront him about his change in behavior, he brushes her off.
Finally, in the couple’s climactic scene, Springsteen tells Faye that he can’t love her any better or any more than he already does — but he knows that’s not what she deserves. Faye leaves tearfully, and Springsteen flees to California.
“With the end of each affair, I’d feel a sad relief from the suffocating claustrophobia love had brought me,” Springsteen wrote in his autobiography. “And I’d be free to be… nothing… again. I’d switch partners, hit rewind and take it from the top, telling myself this time it’d be different. Then it’d be all high times and laughs until fate and that unbearable anxiety came knocking and it’d be one more for the road.”
“I ‘loved’ as best as I could, but I hurt some people I really cared about along the way,” he added. “I didn’t have a clue as to how to do anything else.”
“Deliver Me from Nowhere” is in theaters now.
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