When the first trailer for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere was released this summer, skeptical viewers immediately seized on a monologue delivered by Jon Landau (played by Jeremy Strong), Bruce Springsteen’s longtime manager, explaining that the young Boss grew up with a hole in the floor of his childhood bedroom. “What he’s doing with this album is, he’s repairing that hole in his floor,” Landau says, somewhat literally, about Springsteen’s creative process. “He’s repairing that hole in himself.”

The speech was wisely excised from the final theatrical cut, but the “hole” line lingers over the writer-director Scott Cooper’s film, in which Springsteen’s childhood is an open wound—the abyss he gazes into as he writes the songs that would appear on his 1982 album, Nebraska. Deliver Me From Nowhere follows Warren Zanes’s book of the same title in emphasizing Nebraska as a personal breakthrough, one that was followed by a near–mental breakdown. But in this totalizing autobiographical framing, the majesty of the record is reduced to paternal conflict and blocked masculinity as the film undersells the scope of Springsteen’s engagement with American iconography and musical traditions.

Deliver Me From Nowhere opens in black and white, in the 1950s, as young Springsteen’s mother drives him to the local bar to retrieve his father, a frustrated working stiff impatient for his boy to become a man. As portrayed by Stephen Graham, one of the stars of Netflix’s hit drama Adolescence, Springsteen’s father is an intimidating figure, capable of violent outbursts and equally frightening silences. The movie then jumps forward to the adult Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) in 1981: a rock god in tight jeans and sweat-soaked work shirt, closing out his tour in support of The River, his first LP to top the Billboard charts.