Bruce Springsteen gave a surprise performance of ‘Land Of Hope And Dreams’ after a screening of his new biopic at the New York Film Festival.
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, the upcoming film in which the Boss is played by The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White, screened at the festival’s Alice Tully Hall on Sunday night (September 28).
After it finished, Springsteen himself took to the stage for an impromptu performance of ‘Land Of Hope And Dreams’, a song that became a regular presence in his sets in the early 2000s.
The musician also thanked White for “playing a much better-looking version of me” in the film, as well as Jeremy Strong, who he quipped played “a much, much better-looking version” of his manager Jon Landau.
Watch official footage of the performance here:
Springsteen also paid tribute to his parents Douglas and Adele, who are played by Stephen Graham and Gaby Hoffman in the film. “They’re all gone now, so it’s nice to have this piece of film,” he said.
He also turned his sights to the Donald Trump administration, something he has done many times in recent months. “These days we have daily events reminding us of the fact that we’re living through these particularly dangerous times,” he said. “I spent my life on the road, I’ve been moving around the world as kind of a musical ambassador for America, trying to measure the distance between American reality, where we’ve often fallen short of our ideals of the American dream.”
“But for a lot of folks out there, she continues to be a land of hope and dreams, not of fear or divisiveness or government censorship or hatred. That America’s worth fighting for. So it’s in that spirit I brought along my lifelong weapon of choice, my guitar.”
The movie charts the period in the Boss’ life when he recorded his sixth album ‘Nebraska’ (1982), and it is set to arrive in cinemas on October 23.
The director Scott Cooper recently said that the movie will contain “new information to even his most ardent fans”, adding: “And he never once asked me to sand off the rough edges. But would you expect anything else from Bruce Springsteen? This man who’s the reluctant moral conscience of America?”
Springsteen recently revealed why he gave Deliver Me From Nowhere the go-ahead, despite it charting a “difficult” time in his life.
“You know, it’s really not a biopic,” he said. “It just takes a couple years out of my life when I was 31 and 32, and looks at them really at a time when I made this particular record, and when I went through some just difficult places in my life, you know. And, I’m old and I don’t give a fuck what I do now.”
Critics have largely praised White’s performance in the first reviews of Deliver Me From Nowhere, with one calling his transformation “nothing less than stunning”. Another writer described the movie as an “unorthodox” biopic, while acknowledging Cooper’s “choices that hinder Nowhere from being a truly great film”.
In other news, next month will see Springsteen finally release the legendary electric version of ‘Nebraska’. He has already previewed the collection with a demo version of ‘Born In The U.S.A.’.
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