The Bruce Springsteen Movie exists

Well, the trailer dropped for Bruce Springsteen: The Movie, starring lil' itty-bitty Jeremy Allen White. It's a pretty bold gambit to release this the year after the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, and an even bolder gambit to release it just a few months after A Complete Unknown raked in a grand total of zero Academy Awards. It was nominated for a lot of them, though!

But if you thought that the trailer for A Complete Unknown hit all the musician biopic beats that Walk Hard singlehandedly rendered cliche almost twenty years ago, the Bruce Springsteen Movie, which I believe is titled I Absolutely Refuse to Learn the Actual Title of the Bruce Springsteen Movie, politely asks the A Complete Unknown trailer to hold its beer, or whatever it is that Bruce Springsteen actually drinks. Coffee, probably.

I'm not saying Bruce Springsteen doesn't deserve a movie. I mean, maybe I'm saying that. I've never once in my life considered that Bruce Springsteen the human being might be worth watching a movie about – especially when I could just watch some concert movies of the guy, or listen to his [checks notes] podcast he has with Barack Obama? There's no fucking way that's right.

What in the ... fuck.

This is like the end of Bridge of Spies, where a pre-credits title card informs you that the person Tom Hanks portrayed went on to do something that sounds approximately five thousand times more interesting and exciting than the movie you just spent two-plus hours watching. (And I fucking LOVE Bridge of Spies, by the way. Possibly a top-five Spielberg for me.) Let's make a movie about this weird fucking Obamasteen podcast. The movie where he makes Paul Walter Hauser watch him sing about blowing up the chicken man can take a hike.

As the trailer points out, this isn't even a movie about "how did Bruce Springsteen start out/become big"; this is a movie that begins after Bruce has already sold millions of records and had three top-five albums (including a number one), but I guess his record company doesn't want him to do Nebraska as an acoustic experiment? I will allow that a movie depicting him using Nebraska as a way to work through his past trauma could potentially be interesting, but boy howdy do I not give a shit about that at face value.

It's possible that 2021's Respect has turned me against music biopics as a concept altogether. (And I did totally love A Complete Unknown, but probably 80% of that had to do with Timothée Chalamet, who is at least twice the actor that JAW is and he probably has a good five inches on him, to boot.)

Respect managed to take an actually interesting life story about someone who went through decades of intense hardship, complete with the best possible casting they could have had, and it was such a paint-by-numbers, boring, dreary grab bag of thrice-reheated tropes that it became the movie equivalent of white noise. So impossibly mediocre as to achieve a space beyond badness; a movie that does nothing more than to remind you that you are making a conscious choice to watch this instead of do literally anything else with your life.

So I'm sorry to Bruce and Jeremy and the other Jeremy (Strong), and to Paul Walter and David Krumholtz and Stephen Graham and whoever plays Blonde Woman Touching Foreheads With Bruce Springsteen On The Beach, all of whom I have enjoyed in many other things. (I am making an assumption on the part of BWTFWBSOTB, who I do not immediately recognize in the trailer and I am too tired to visit this movie's Wikipedia page to figure it out.) Best of luck with your music biopic.

I was going to end with a joke about what music biopic they should make, and then I remembered that they made George & Tammy, a miniseries starring two perfect actors and based on the craziest fucking life story this side of The Righteous Gemstones, and even that was completely mid.

Take a hike, music biopics. You've done all you can do at this point.