BOSS MITIGATION

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere--Exhausted after the 1982 tour for his album The River, Bruce Springsteen rented a house in Colt's Neck, New Jersey, and tried to figure out what to do next. Unsettled by his rapidly increasing stardom, he started strumming an acoustic guitar and writing downbeat songs about downtrodden, desperate working-class Americans. These would make up his 1982 release Nebraska, as well as his 1984 hit machine Born in the USA.

Scott Cooper's biopic, adapted from a 2023 book by Del Fuegos guitarist Warren Zanes, recounts this chapter from the life of "The Boss" (Jeremy Allen White, as an adult). The focus is narrowly on that brief but critical period in his development, but we also see him haunted by his past; his troubled childhood with his drunken, scary but not unloving Dad (Stephen Graham) and his anxious, loving Mom, played here by Gaby Hoffmann. How upsetting is it that Gaby Hoffmann is now old enough to play Mom roles?

Shot in fine, muted tones by Masanobu Takayanagi, it's a watchable, absorbing movie. Although we're shown Springsteen's wary, commitment-phobic relationship with a lovely (fictional) new girlfriend (Odessa Young), Cooper honestly tries to keep the focus on the vagaries of the creative process; how moping around, reading Flannery O'Connor and repeatedly watching Terrence Malick's Badlands can be essential to finding your voice.

But this behavior, however essential, can be a drag for the people around you, and that includes not only friends and family and lovers and co-workers but also the movie audience watching you. White is first-rate; exploding into life in the scenes in which he sings (blasphemy alert: I'm not sure I don't like White's singing better than Springsteen's), suggesting that performance may have been a form of therapy, even self-medication, for Springsteen. He's moving in his depressive mode, too, but there's no getting around it, the movie becomes a long dark night of the soul in these passages, and they make up a lot of screen time.

The best performance in Deliver Me from Nowhere is by Jeremy Strong as Springsteen manager Jon Landau. His hangdog manner is hilarious; every time his boss The Boss gives Landau more bad news, not only about what kind of album Nebraska is going to be but about how he wants it released--without press, a tour, or even Springsteen's picture on the sleeve--you see it register on Strong's sickened face. Then you see him stoically shake it off.

As depicted here, he's skeptical about the business wisdom of Springsteen's decisions, but he walks the walk when it comes to defending artistic integrity; his loyalty never wavers. He's the hero of the movie.

WALK SHOW

Opening today:

Wild—Back in the early ‘90s, Cheryl Strayed decided to take up hiking. Maybe a nice stroll around the block to start with, or a lap or two around the mall? No, Strayed figured she’d start by trudging well over a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, from the Mexican border to the Bridge of the Gods over the Columbia River.

Strayed wasn’t the sort to do things in moderation. She grieved her mother’s death from cancer by plunging into heroin addiction and reckless sex to the point where she drove off her long-suffering husband. Then she decided to exorcise these demons by, as her mother would say, “putting herself in the way of beauty,” hiking the PCT with an enormous backpack. She found plenty of beauty, along with physical exhaustion, bleeding feet and encounters with lots of creepy guys.

Now Reese Witherspoon is playing Strayed in this movie version of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, her 2012 bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club pick about her schlep. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée from an adaptation by Nick Hornby, the movie is shameless Oscar bait: Big doses of Witherspoon grunting and sweating as she struggles up the trail, intercut with flashbacks of her grunting and sweating as she has sex with guys or shoots up.

Laura Dern is touching as the departed Mom, W. Earl Brown is funny as an oddball farmer, and Evan O’Toole has a great scene as a little boy who sings to Strayed. Other than that, the supporting cast of Wild doesn’t get to make much of an impression. It’s pretty much all Reese, all the time.

Still, it’s a credible, convincing performance in a skillfully made film. Glad though I am if it was helpful to Strayed, I admit I’m skeptical of this sort of grand, self-imposed, self-cleansing gesture. Not only would I wonder about its long-term therapeutic efficacy, it’s hard to banish the sense that it’s a middle-class indulgence—Strayed came from the working-class, but her aspirations and, as the movie amusingly acknowledges, her snobberies were of a middle-class literary sort.

Having said all that, I can also understand the psychological appeal of the idea, plausible or not, of setting your spiritual house in order in one hard pilgrimage. And Wild is an absorbing dramatization of it.

SLATE SHOW

Opening this weekend:

Obvious Child—It might be called the anti-Juno. It’s another romcom where the cute quirky young woman finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy, but this time she unhesitatingly decides she wants an abortion, and is upset that she has to wait two weeks, for medical reasons, to get it—on Valentine’s Day, no less.

Said young woman is Donna, played by Jenny Slate, a tiny Saturday Night Live veteran with a pretty, anxiously optimistic face. Donna is a small-potatoes stand-up comic who, sad and very drunk, has an unprotected one-night stand with a nice goyish type (Jake Lacy) and soon realizes she’s in a jam. When they meet again sober, they find they like each other, and would maybe like to be parents someday, but Donna is sure she’s not ready yet.

With reproductive rights under legislative attack in many parts of the country it’s probably well to put a human face on this predicament, and Slate’s sweet face is a good choice. She carries the movie nicely—a friend of mine predicts that this is her star turn before a long career of playing wisecracking roommates and cubicle neighbors—and she gets capable support from the small cast, which includes Richard Kind and Polly Draper as her parents and Gaby Hoffmann as her wisecracking roommate.

Written and directed by Gillian Robespierre, the movie is slight, watchable and somehow not quite satisfying. But it’s honest and believable.

How To Train Your Dragon 2—This sequel to the 2010 animated charmer, adapted from the books by Cressida Cowell, continues the adventure of young human hero Hiccup and his dragon Toothless, who taught the Viking culture of Berk to be dragon trainers instead of dragon-slayers. Now the dragon-loving colony is threatened by a growling warlord who enslaves dragons through his mastery of a gargantuan “Alpha” monster who compels obedience in others of its species.

The appeal of this movie—and it’s extremely appealing—lies in the characterizations, both of the humans and of the dragons, who have endearingly canine personalities. The story takes a sad turn about two-thirds in, but while it’s upsetting, the loss makes sense in the context of a robust adventure story.

HTTYD2 is likely to hold up as one of the best animated films of the year. As far as I’m concerned, in its sunnier way, it’s as visually and thematically extravagant a fantasy as Peter Jackson’s Tolkien movies.