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The Art of Being the Boss

Fifty years after the monumental 'Born to Run', Bruce Springsteen
is still grappling with the American story - and his own

By Eric Cortellessa in Time

n a gray October afternoon in 2023, Bruce Springsteen opened the door of a rented Jersey Shore cottage and ushered three men inside to discuss something he'd long resisted: a film about his life.

Springsteen had invited Scott Cooper, director of brooding films such as Crazy Heart and Out of the Furnace; Warren Zanes, author of the definitive book on his 1982 acoustic masterpiece Nebraska, and his longtime manager Jon Landau, serving what he claimed were Philly cheesesteaks. "These were not cheesecakes," Zanes remembers. "This was really good steak on artisanal bread with exquisite cheese."

From the outset, Springsteen was drawn to Cooper's vision -- not a cradle-to-grave biopic but a compact character study. "This narrow time frame deeper truths about Bruce's lifelong struggles with identity and creative honesty," Cooper says. Hardly anyone expected Springsteen to say yes. But with age, Springsteen says, he's become more willing to agree to proposals he once dismissed. "I'm old. I don't give a f-ck what I do anymore!" he says with a grin. "As you get older, you feel a lot freer."

Springsteen recounts the process in a dimly lit Stone Pony, the fabled club that launched his career. He became a fixture here just before his 1975 breakout Born to Run, when he was on a three-record deal with Columbia. His first two albums in 1973 were praised by critics, but they disappointed commercially, and the label shifted its attention to Billy Joel. At risk of being cast aside, Springsteen shed the rhyme-drunk ballads of his earlier work. He barely had a driver's license but understood what cars represented to a country rattled by the oil embargo: gas prices had soared, and an ordinary symbol of American freedom suddenly felt precarious. If gas was too expensive, you couldn't drive. If you couldn't drive, you lost your agency. "I didn't know a lot about cars," he says, "but I knew what they meant. It was simply a metaphor."

Born to Run fused the street-level detail of Dylan with the operatic grandeur of Phil Spector. Its opening track, "Thunder Road," is a summons: the singer beckons Mary into his car, a chance to flee "a town full of losers" for a better life. "Jungleland," the nine-minute finale, stages the saga of the Magic Rat and the barefoot girl, who slip across Jersey into Harlem only to see their dreams collapse. Critics hailed Born to Run as a crowning achievement, something both sui generis and revitalizing. The counterculture had curdled, Vietnam was over but unsettled, and the economy sagged into stagflation. Into that drift came a wiry kid from Freehold, N.J., who made the ordinary seem mythic. "It was a magical group of things and circumstances that helped deliver this guy and deliver Columbia's dream," says Springsteen's first manager Mike Appel.

On Oct. 20, 1975, Springsteen appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek -- a feat once reserved for Presidents, Popes, or astronauts. For Springsteen, holed up at the Sunset Marquis for a four-night stand at the Roxy, it felt like a curse. "It's making you very, very different than all the people you grew up with," he says. Success was both exhilarating and terrifying; his sister Pam recalls paparazzi peering into their parents' kitchen. Springsteen and his circle worried about the "hype," a toxic word that suggested the deflators weren't far behind. What haunted him even more was how fame might change him. "It's a very distorted lens to live your life through," he says. "You have to be very protective of yourself, of what matters dearly to you."

With 1978's Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen planted his feet with those who never made it out -- using his songs to speak to someone he could not otherwise reach. He turned toward the working class, sketching figures who resembled his father -- the stoic men of "Factory," the dreamers of "Racing in the Street."

Douglas Springsteen was a taciturn, drifting through jobs he could never keep -- cabdriver, prison guard -- and prone to rages and long silences, staying up late with beer and cigarettes. He was emotionally absent from his three children -- Bruce, Virginia, and Pam -- and especially hard on his son, who says his father never once said he loved him. The family's mediator and breadwinner, the one who carried its optimism and kept it afloat, was Bruce's mother Adele, who worked as a legal secretary. (Bruce says now that his bleak songs came from his father whereas his joyous ones -- "Rosalita," "Out in the Street" -- came from his mother.) For a working-class man in the 1950s, seeking psychiatric care meant defying social mores. Only decades later was Doug Springsteen diagnosed as bipolar and schizophrenic -- enabling him to get the help he needed. But Bruce would always fear that the strain of mental illness running through his family might one day ensnare him.

Springsteen's next record, The River, veered toward connection. "For a long time, I did not write any love songs," he says. "I figured other people were taking care of it. I was interested in other topics, and I simply didn't know what it was." The album produced his first Billboard Top 10 single, "Hungry Heart," and the verdict at Columbia was clear: Springsteen was on the brink of superstardom.

This is where the film Deliver Me From Nowhere begins. After The River Tour, Springsteen plunged into psychic free fall. Instead of chasing hits, he retreated to a house in Colts Neck with a four-track recorder. What emerged was Nebraska: a desolate gallery of outlaws, killers, and lost souls. After Springsteen laid several tracks for what would become 1984's Born in the U.S.A., which everyone knew was lightning in a bottle, he took a break to record demos on a cassette with the plan of re-creating them in the studio with the E Street Band. But the more they rerecorded them, the more Springsteen hated it, so he decided to release the tapes as they were. When Nebraska came out on Sept. 30, 1982, Springsteen let the music speak for itself -- no interviews, no tour.

He then took a road trip out west and had a breakdown, but in therapy found reconciliation -- with both his past and with his father, played in the film by Stephen Graham. "My father was a tough guy," Springsteen says. "He was tough when he was young. He was tough on me when I was young, but fundamentally, underneath, he was a vulnerable, fragile, sweet-hearted, and soulful man. I think you see that part of him at the end of the film." When the movie debuted at the Telluride Film Festival, the reviews were glowing. Already, the film is generating Oscar buzz.

To play the role, The Bear actor Jeremy Allen White spent hours studying Springsteen -- listening to his memoir on tape, watching old interviews -- but knew to avoid imitation. He doesn't adapt Springsteen's twang but embodies him psychologically. They first met at a sound check in London's Wembley Stadium last year and cultivated a friendship. White says he made a pact with Springsteen, Landau, and Cooper: "Let's make a move about a musician during this period of his life that just so happens to be Bruce Springsteen."

If anyone saw Springsteen clearly in this period, it was Landau -- portrayed in the film with uncanny precision by Jeremy Strong. (When he phoned Thom Zimny, Springsteen's longtime filmmaker, to request archival footage, Strong was still in character, Zimny tells me -- method to the core.) Their relationship forms the film's emotional spine, elevating it into a love story. After Nebraska's release, Springsteen considered suicide. Landau told him plainly, "You need professional help." The next day, the manager got the star into a therapist's office. "It was and has been a total life changer," Springsteen says.

After his therapist of 25 years died, Springsteen kept going. "When I walked into a new therapist's office," he says. "I had a lot more information than when I first walked into Dr. Meyers' and said, 'I don't have a home, I don't have a partner, I don't have a life beyond my work, and those are things I want."

  

t a show in the 1990s, Springsteen performed "My Father's House," a harrowing song from Nebraska. The narrator dreams of embracing his estranged father, only to wake, drive to the old home, and find a stranger at the door. His father has vanished, their sins lie unatoned, the hope of reconciliation lost. Onstage, Springsteen framed it with a story from therapy. He confessed to his habit of circling his childhood home.

"Something bad happened," Dr. Meyers told him. "You're going back thinking you can make it right again."

"That is what I'm doing," Springsteen replied.

"Well," Dr. Myers said, "you can't."

When I ask how he absorbed that insight, how he put it into practice, Springsteen pauses. "Well, I don't know," he says. "I still drive by that house."  

Ozzy's Final Days

A new book and documentary detail the final days of the metal icon

By Rachel DeSantis in People

eave it to the Prince of Darkness to keep fans entertained from beyond the grave. Ozzy Osbourne may have died on July 22 at age 76, but the rocker is in the spotlight again thanks to the release of a new memoir and documentary that chronicle his final years and the hard work that went into putting on the Back to the Beginning farewell concert in Birmingham, England, on July 5.

Last Rites (out now) explores the "Crazy Train" singer's many brushes with death over the years -- including the "dodgy heart valve" that ultimately killed him. (His official cause of death included cardiac arrest and acute myocardial infarction.)

In the book Osbourne reveals that his valve was 80 percent blocked due to a previously undisclosed sepsis infection in early 2025 that also gave him an irregular heartbeat. "The docs would operate, but to do the operation, I'd have to stop taking my blood thinners, and that would be too dangerous," he writes. "Death's been knocking at my door for the last six years... and at some point, I'm gonna have to let him in."

He also reveals that such talk of death was not tolerated by his family (including wife Sharon, 73, and their kids Aimee, 42, Kelly, 40, and Jack, 39) -- save for one important topic. "The only conversation I've had with Sharon was when we decided we wanted to be buried together," he explains. In the Paramount+ documentary Ozzy Osbourne: No Escape From Now (which began streaming on Oct. 7), the rocker even shares his hopes for his future with Sharon, whom he married in 1982. "I'm looking forward to getting this [Back to the Beginning] gig over, hanging my mic up and spending some time with her," he says. "It's time. I didn't think I was gonna live past 40. I shouldn't have lived past 40. But I did. And if my life's coming to an end, I really can't complain. I've had a great life."  

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