According to the title card of Deliver Me From Nowhere, the opening scene of the new Springsteen biopic takes place in Riverside Stadium, Cincinnati, 1981—the final stop on his tour with his 1980 album The River. In his Cincinnati dressing room, The Boss is drenched and exhausted anticipating a much-needed break back home in New Jersey.
Anyone hoping for a two-hour music video is in the wrong theater. What I got instead was far more meaningful—as a creative person myself, and as someone who often champions the creative work of others.
I leaned toward Matt in the darkened theater and whispered, “I saw him way before 1981. I’ve still got the ticket stub to prove it.”
It turns out my ticket came from the 1978 Darkness on the Edge of Town tour, which isn’t addressed in The Springsteen movie, but the history behind that album has a direct bearing on the story.
Prior to my encounter with Springsteen and the E-Street Band at Veterans Memorial Auditorium, he had spent nearly two years in a legal standoff with his first manager, barred from recording while he fought for control of his own music. When the case finally broke in his favor, he poured that hard-won freedom into Darkness—an album about work, integrity, and the cost of independence. He later called those two years “the price of freedom.” The scar ran deep.
By the time the film opens in 1981—three years and another album later—he’s back at the edge again, famous this time, but spent.
Sitting there in the dark, I felt the movie reach straight into my own creative life. Trying to make good art as I see it while the commercial market is looking elsewhere, using cookie cutters, and exploring ways to cut the artist out of the creative process.
Deliver Me From Nowhere is ultimately about creative sovereignty: how commercial machinery and its gatekeepers treat the geniuses who make art as means to their ends. It’s about needing a champion, and about allowing yourself to break down so you can build yourself back up again.
I don’t remember saving that ticket forty-seven years ago, only finding it last summer when Matt and I finally tackled the storage room. It was tucked inside a carved wooden box lined with felt, nestled among a few high-school photos. Steve—the boyfriend who first put Springsteen in my ears—had given me the box, and the ticket he’d bought at the counter in the back of the Sears & Roebuck store, a birthday gift from another lifetime.
Readers of my Substack series Buckskin Rides Again know that I’ve been wrestling with memories—and with the artifacts that still hold their charge. They know I came to the habit of saving bits and bobs through my mother’s example, and that I’m still learning how to make peace with our shared tendencies.
Watching Springsteen fight his own demons on screen felt like standing inside that storage unit, surrounded by boxes full of surprises I’d kept to remind myself who I once was—and what it took to keep creating through loss, reinvention, and the long work of becoming myself.
The theater’s house lights edged up as the credits began to roll, accompanied by one of my favorite Springsteen songs, Atlantic City. Its refrain brought me to tears:
Well, not everything dies baby, that’s a fact
Maybe everything that dies someday comes back…
If that didn’t sum up Deliver Me From Nowhere, what does? Maybe that’s why the tears came so easily—because the song, the movie, and that old ticket were all saying the same thing: some things come back.
In the movie, The Boss comes back from a debilitating depression and relaunches his career on his own terms. His 1978 tour introduced him to me, when he was just learning what freedom demanded.
Most of America met him only after that—already remade. That’s what makes the movie so important: it reminds us that coming back doesn’t always mean returning; sometimes it means remaking.
My tears welled up, spilled over, and came back with force, so I bolted for a stall in the ladies’ room to regain my composure.
The rest of the day pulled me back into the noise—the errands, the obligations—but for a moment in that small stall, I remembered what it feels like to come back to myself.
The matinee crowd had dispersed by the time I met Matt in the lobby. Walking to the car, he asked gently how the movie touched the work I’ve been doing and the lows that sometimes accompany it.
“I’m not ready to talk about it yet,” I said, but squeezed his hand reassuringly. Some things need to steep before they can be poured.
We drove on in silence, toward the next obligation of the day.
Ten minutes later, we pulled into The Barclay—a luxury retirement community whose lobby shimmered in tones of pearl and robin’s-egg blue. Everything gleamed: the coffered ceiling, the polished floors, even the smiles. It was built to make aging look effortless, and we were there to hug the necks of a family whose patriarch had passed at ninety-two.
My energy dripped away like a leaky faucet—from the unflinching movie to a memorial gathering. We left as soon as courtesy allowed.
Matt wouldn’t have mentioned it, but I’d seen the insulated shopping bags he’d tossed in the back seat. That man loves a good run through the grocery store after the Saturday delivery trucks have come in.
“I know you want to go to Whole Foods,” I said. “How about dropping me at the mall while you do? I need to pick up some winter tights.”
Minutes later, I walked into Nordstrom’s foundations department. Nothing. Fifteen minutes later, I was in the depleted hosiery closet at Neiman Marcus. Half an hour after that, I found myself in a long line at Belk’s third-floor cashier station—because there was no one on the fourth floor to take my money for the only suitable pair of tights I’d found all day.
I shouldn’t have been eavesdropping on the mother and daughter in front of me as they checked out, but I was ready when the cashier asked for my email address.
“I will not be providing that information.”
The cashier met me where I was. “‘No thank you’ would have been more polite,” she said.
I honored her forthrightness. My irritation and need for privacy wasn’t about a woman doing her job. It wasn’t about the email, either. It was about everything that day had asked of me—the steady leak of energy from movie to memorial to mall.
My “no” just happened to land at a checkout counter, but it was really about wanting one part of myself the world couldn’t have. That morning I’d skimmed a Substack article, “The Cartelization of the Consumer,” and boy, did it hit a nerve.
Its premise is that goods and services aren’t truly on offer to consumers—not the way we’ve been trained to think of our culture of choice. Instead, we’re the revenue stream, not the reason the system runs. It’s easy to see in a business model like Facebook’s, which makes its money selling ads, but it’s also true everywhere from the grocery aisle to the car lot to the real-estate closing table, as the article outlined. Every checkout has become another opportunity to take a bite out of us.
Denying Belk Department Stores access to my personal email was a hill I would’ve died on that day. It was a matter of personal sovereignty. The article named what I’d been feeling all day: that exhaustion isn’t just personal—it’s structural.
What does it mean to stay human—and self-possessed—in a world that keeps trying to turn us into products?
The essay was talking about markets, but it could just as easily have been about art—or about anyone who makes something real in a world built to monetize attention. That’s what made the Springsteen film hit so hard. It showed what happens when a person stops being a product long enough to remember who he is and what he’s for.
When I finally looked closely at that old ticket, I noticed the concert date had been crossed out and corrected by hand. The album and tour had been postponed while Springsteen fought for his creative freedom. That delay was the cost of sovereignty. My ticket had carried that story all along; I just hadn’t seen it.
With his manager Jon Landau’s help, Springsteen took back his work and made the album Nebraska on his own terms—in his bedroom, on a simple cassette tape. It’s a vivid example of how sovereignty doesn’t have to look grand. Sometimes it’s a home-recorded album. Sometimes it’s a woman in a checkout line saying “no.”
Bonus:
If you’d like the factual backstory behind that 1978 Ohio tour, this set of interviews tells it best.
