Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

Who was it who said all unhappy rock stars are alike, no happy rock star has ever truly existed in the history of this earth? Probably the same writer who famously pondered “War, what is it good for?”

So it is that Scott Cooper takes a turn at the musical biopic for the remaining living legends of the rock canon, here adapting Warren Zane’s history of the making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. As with all of these films, it’s nearly impossible to make the creation of a great work of art seem anything less than inevitable in the rear view mirror of history. The splendor of the songs is self evident, so the pleasure rests entirely on witnessing a facsimile of their creation. The rest — a reliance on literalism, frequent flashbacks to a troubled relationship with a highly troubled father, and the insistence on including a spotty romantic relationship — are all degrees of unnecessary distraction from the main event.

Luckily no one aside from Springsteen himself wears a white t-shirt, weathered flannel, or signature leather jacket quite as well as Jeremy Allen White, who finds ways to ascend beyond the genre’s tropes and sweaty mimicry to find some glimmers of deep truth about writing an album as a cry for help. In a welcomely warm turn, Jeremy Strong commits to a terrible haircut to portray longtime manager Jon Landau, who fiercely defends Bruce’s creative process and insulates him from the demands of burgeoning stardom.

A film like this is right in the sweetest of sweet spots for a Telluride crowd and the audience ate it up. It didn’t hurt that the Boss himself made a surprise appearance in town to introduce the film to rapturous applause. [FULL REVIEW]

Ballad of a Small Player

With his trademark assaultive soundtrack and gorgeously garish neon-lit photography of a city stacked with casinos, Edward Berger casts Macau as a hellscape for a gambler’s hallucinatory descent.

No one balances insatiable optimism and crushing desperation quite as sweatily as Colin Farrell, who anchors this dark fable with a jittery tour-de-force performance of a man constantly spinning to create a credible character from whole cloth. As the walls of debt and criminality close in on him, he’s somehow wetter and more disheveled in every scene. Tilda Swinton makes an appearance as a woman in pursuit, but be it the harsh light of day or the dreamy humid nights, the show is entirely Farrell’s as he suffers excesses, humiliations, and high stakes gambits at the Baccarat table (a game that, despite a voiceover tutorial, I am incapable of understanding, which is probably for the best as far as my pocketbook is concerned).

The film loses itself a bit for my taste as reality breaks into dream logic and big picture lessons, but it looks and feels spectacular on its way to an empty conclusion.

La Grazia

Usually working in modes of youthful passion, furious exercise of power, or mythic spirituality, Paolo Sorrentino instead takes on the challenge of examining their inverse: a life absent any of those animating spirits.

Frequent collaborator Tony Servillo plays the president of Italy as he approaches the final half year of a term that saw the relentlessly sensible jurist steering a grateful country from the brink of a chaotic crisis. A politician likened to reinforced concrete, his waning days find him wrestling with intertwined decisions regarding euthanasia (both for a beloved horse as well as an enshrined right for all human citizens) and clemency requests. Preoccupied with his own grief over his late wife and distance from his adult children, the film makes room for poetic images and big ideas to tangle in a contemplative coda of a life attempting to shock itself awake again.