Is the new Springsteen film final proof that Spotify killed the music biopic?

There is a long, dragging section in the middle of Scott Cooper’s dull new Bruce Springsteen biopic depicting the studio-based efforts to reproduce a sound the Boss first captured on a four-track recorder, with an acoustic guitar, in the back bedroom of his Colts Neck, New Jersey rental. You don’t need to have memorised the liner notes to his 1982 album Nebraska to guess how that turned out: it cannot be done. 

Sadly, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere has not heeded its own lesson. In this film, the sweaty exertions of star Jeremy Allen White, several black-and-white childhood flashbacks, plus lines and lines of baldly expository dialogue succeed only in sucking the magic and mystery out of some of the 20th century’s most inspired songwriting. Watching it is not like experiencing the creative moment live. Watching it is like listening to a Woolworths CD-RW of the creative moment, burned from a Napster file of an old cassette, recorded off the radio, which you found under the front seat of your dad’s car. Only not as fun.

There was a time when it was enough for a music biopic to tell a good story with some good songs. As late as 2005, when Reese Witherspoon won the Oscar for playing June Carter Cash opposite Joaquin Phoenix’s Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, there was some merit in the endeavour. But 20 years on, in an era when you can instantly summon up your favourite artist’s music on Spotify or Apple Music, watch their best performance on YouTube, then patch together the corresponding biographical details via the “Personal Life” section of their Wikipedia page, the music biopic is struggling to justify its existence. 

In recent years we’ve had an Elvis one, a Bob Marley one, the Amy Winehouse one, the Whitney Houston one and another go at Bob Dylan. All of them made by competent – and, occasionally, genuinely great – filmmakers, and all featuring talented actors at the height of their appeal. Yet none managed to escape the whiff of wig glue, the waft of dry ice or the ghostly echo of that Stars in Their Eyes catchphrase: “Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be …”

When, Matthew, did everything start to go wrong? Maybe it was at 12.01am on 1 August 1981, when MTV launched with the Buggles’s Video Killed the Radio Star: a waggish choice which seems less amusing with each passing year. Music videos didn’t deal the fatal blow, of course, but their advent did institute a newly symbiotic relationship between the musician and the moving image, shaping a generation of filmmakers – Paul Thomas Anderson, Jonathan Glazer, Sofia Coppola and others – who came up making videos for their mates’ bands. Now MTV is dead (all but the reality-TV-broadcasting MTV HD will close in the UK by the end of the year), TikTok sets the trends and streaming is here, poised to finish off the Buggles-foreseen job. 

One lifeline is the music auto-biopic. Not all pop stars have the movie-making knack, but some do. In 2023, Mike Skinner wrote, directed, soundtracked and starred in a feature-length film, The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light, which successfully transposed the ambitious originality and storytelling verve of the Streets’s music into a London-clubland-set neo-noir. It’s not straightforwardly biographical, but coming directly from the artist meant it said more about his artistry than most of what purports to do so on screen. 

There are also intriguing film projects in the works from reclusive R&B singer Frank Ocean (Rye Lane’s David Jonsson will reportedly star) and Charli XCX (The Moment is billed as “a mockumentary revolving around a pop star gearing up to lead her first headlining tour”). These promise to interrogate the nature of the musician’s public image, and their role in its construction, as opposed to being just another thinly disguised marketing exercise (see Stormzy’s recent film Big Man for Apple and Pharrell Williams’s Lego animation Piece by Piece). But then that’s always the risk when the subject is too involved in the production – that cinema's balance between art and commerce tips too far toward the latter. 

Thankfully, the inoculation against this disease already exists, and it’s the same life-giving tonic which is vital for any music biopic, now that streaming has made the old-fashioned straightforward style redundant: genuine creative intent. Like Springsteen’s long-suffering audio engineer could have told you, it can’t be a copy, however polished and professional the studio setup: it has to be the thing itself. 

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is released on Friday 24 October in UK and Irish cinemas