This is the Sunday special. I'm Gilbert Cruz.

It's possible you've seen somewhere on the internet or somewhere in your social media feeds

images of the actor Jeremy Allen White looking a lot like Bruce Springsteen.

That's because this Friday, the film

Springsteen, Deliver Me from Nowhere, is coming out. And it's a movie about a brief and dark

and very specific period of Springsteen's life. And that's what we're going to talk about today,

not just that upcoming movie, but we're going to be talking generally about the music biopic.

It's a genre that Hollywood loves to dip into, and it's a genre that the Academy really loves to reward with lots and lots of Oscar nominations.

Today I'm here with two of my colleagues, Lindsay Zolads, a pop music critic here at the Times,

an author of our Amplifier Newsletter.

Welcome, Lindsay.

Hi.

And Joe Coscarelli, a culture reporter and one of the co-hosts of Popcast.

Thanks for being here, Joe.

Hey, Gilbert.

So let's start off by talking about the Springsteen movie. So Deliver Me from Nowhere is about

the making of his album, Nebraska. It's the early 80s. He's just come off several hit

records, a hit tour. And as we all know now, he was driven to record and release this very stripped-down,

extremely lo-fi album without the East Street band. I saw this movie a couple months ago at the

Telleride Film Festival. Joe, you recently saw this movie. What sort of expectations did you have

going in? What were you curious about?

I was curious about a music biopic that was about a rock star watching Terrence Malik's

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