It wouldn’t be awards season without an obvious and ponderous music biopic, and Scott Cooper fulfills that requirement with Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, an origin story for the Boss’ beloved 1982 album Nebraska that’s like a greatest-hits package of genre clichés.

Drumming up zero tension or momentum, both because it barely boasts a narrative and because it spells everything out in the most ham-fisted way imaginable, the Crazy Heart and Out of the Furnace director’s latest—showing at the New York Film Festival ahead of its Oct. 24 theatrical premiere—is affected and plodding and, thus, the exact opposite of its subject. From its script to its score to its lead performance by Jeremy Allen White, it’s nothing more than a shallow cover song.

Coming off a triumphant 1981 tour in su

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