Deliver Me From Nowhere: Odessa Young Steps Into Bruce Country

Odessa Young captivates as a young mother whose quiet strength grounds Scott Cooper’s intimate Bruce Springsteen biopic

There are some actors you see up on screen for the first time and know right away you’d follow them anywhere, and Odessa Young is one such performer. The Sydney-born star was beguiling opposite Elisabeth Moss in Shirley, Josephine Decker’s erotically charged psychodrama about the writer Shirley Jackson, electric in Sam Levinson’s lurid teen satire Assassination Nation, and heartbreaking in Justin Kurzel’s tragic WWII-set romantic drama The Narrow Road to the Deep North, released this year.

In Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Scott Cooper’s rousing rock biopic starring Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen, she excels once again in a role that might easily have toppled into romantic-interest cliche. Cooper’s film takes a striking approach to the Boss’s story, zooming in on a dark chapter leading to the creation of Nebraska, one of his bleakest but most enduring works. Under pressure from his label who sense that his star is about to go supernova, the musician retreats to his hometown of Long Branch, New Jersey, where the past catches up with him as he slides into a deep depressive funk. “I’m searching for something real in all of the noise,” he says in a trailer-ready moment from the film, and that’s exactly what he finds in Faye (Young), a young single mum and waitress living at home with her mother. Ironically, her character in the film is a “composite”, drawn from several women in the musician’s life.

A self-confessed Springsteen superfan – she tells me his face was iced on to her 16th birthday cake – Young seized on the chance to audition for the role, sending Cooper a self-tape that she later decided she was “deeply unhappy” with. “I was feeling incredibly anxious and depressed,” says the actor, who discovered Bruce’s work through her father, a musician, and describes his music as a “lifeline” through various moments in her life. “I felt I wanted to get out of New York, and I found this converted schoolbus [to stay in], in someone’s backyard in rural New Jersey. Kind of in Bruce country. And I felt like I wanted to be there, because I just had this feeling. So I went and wrote Scott this letter, kind of fully pretending that I hadn’t gone there for the film. It just felt like something I needed to do.”

Whatever she wrote, it worked: when Young found out she’d landed the role, she called up her dad to share the news, having kept it under wraps till now for fear of breaking his heart: “I remember asking him, ‘Do you know the director, Scott Cooper?’ And he was like, ‘Oh yeah, Crazy Heart, right?’ ‘Well, he’s making a Bruce Springsteen biopic.’ And my dad was like, ‘Oh yeah? That’s great, incredible. So what else is going on then?’ Like, he thought the fact there was a film being made was the news. And then I said, ‘Well, I’m gonna be in it.’ And there was this prolonged silence. It was a great call to make.”

There were no chemistry reads for the role, with Young meeting Allen White just once at a film screening before being asked to jump into bed for a postcoital scene on her first day on set. “I was like, ‘Excuse me?!’,” laughs Young, “so I went in and did a terrible take, obviously. It was such a weird place to jump in: like, OK, great we just had sex last night, now I’ve gotta put together the pieces in the moment of where my character is supposed to be, without any kind of rehearsal or whatever. But it was interesting jumping in like that as well.”

Young says she “barely remembers” her first meeting with the real-life Boss, at the same screening where she met Allen White, because she was so nervous. “I just did, like, straight-up dad jokes at him,” she laughs, “but he was obviously just so lovely and the ultimate gentleman.” Later, when Springsteen was on set for a scene at a diner where Faye delivers some difficult home truths, he took her to one side during a break in filming. “He told me how happy he was with the scene, and that this was something that really happened to him – that someone really did have this conversation with him where they’d taken him to task,” says Young, who gets a great line in the scene reminding Springsteen that she and her daughter are flesh-and-blood people, not characters from one of his songs. “It was so nice to hear him be appreciative about what I was doing, because that moment was real.”

Deliver Me From Nowhere is out in cinemas today.