Wendy Ide’s pick of other films: Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, Hedda and more

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere

(119 mins, 12A) Directed by Scott Cooper; starring Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Odessa Young

It’s a well-worn music biopic hack: if the scope of a career and musical legacy is just too overstuffed to cram into the confines of a feature film, pick a key transformative moment instead. Preferably something that has a weighty cultural legacy and encapsulates the maverick spirit of the artist: take Bob Dylan’s transition from acoustic to electric in A Complete Unknown, which culminated in a conveniently climactic mass audience tantrum at the Newport folk festival. Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, starring The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White in uncanny-valley dark contact lenses, attempts the same technique. The career moment explored is the writing and recording of Nebraska, Springsteen’s 1982 sixth studio album.

You can see the reasoning behind it: the introspective quality of the songs gives Cooper leeway to weave in flashbacks of formative childhood hardship. The record is a window into the depression Springsteen battled through much of his life, and was groundbreaking for him as an artist.

Unfortunately, what made Nebraska groundbreaking – the fact that it was captured on a portable four-track recorder set up in the bedroom of Springsteen’s New Jersey home – isn’t particularly cinematic. Cooper is forced to rely heavily on that most stagnant of biopic tropes: the creative inspiration montage. Thus, we are shown multiple shots of Bruce pensively leafing through the collected writings of Flannery O’Connor; Bruce noodling around on his guitar and scrawling half-formed lyrics in his notebook; Bruce gazing forlornly into the middle distance. No music movie cliche is left unmolested.

It all renders the film rather inert. Which is a pity as, in the rare moments he’s allowed to take to the stage and cut loose, White is quite impressive, capturing something of the electrifying, raw energy of the Boss at his best. And while I have grave reservations about the decision to give Springsteen a fictionalised love interest, Odessa Young strikes an appealing balance between starstruck fan and down-to-earth, blue-collar survivor as single mum and diner waitress Faye.

Elsewhere, Jeremy Strong channels his trademark sinewy intensity into producer Jon Landau, and Stephen Graham impresses as Bruce’s unpredictable and unstable father. Ultimately, the music is the star – the cast are just bit players in its service.

Hedda

(107 mins, 15) Directed by Nia DaCosta; starring Tessa Thompson, Imogen Poots, Nina Hoss

The Marvel bounce-back phenomenon gathers momentum. Directors Ryan Coogler (Sinners), Chloé Zhao (the forthcoming Hamnet) and now Nia DaCosta, with her snarling, sexy, sapphic twist on Henrik Ibsen’s 1890 play Hedda Gabler: all are demonstrating that getting sucked into the superhero sausage factory doesn’t need to be a creative life sentence.

In the title role of restless, manipulative new wife Hedda, Tessa Thompson vamps her way through this unapologetically salacious retooling of the play. Tom Bateman plays her ineffectual academic husband, George, who is up to his eyeballs in debt and out of his depth with his mercurial minx of a wife. The story unfolds at an orgiastic jazz age soiree at Hedda’s villa, swimming with drugs, martinis and sexual intrigue.

Into this heady mix arrives Hedda’s newly sober former lover, the gender-flipped rival for her husband’s promotion, Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss), who brings with her a new partner, Thea (Imogen Poots), and – oops! – the only copy of her important manuscript. This is not, you might have gathered, a slavishly loyal adaptation; it’s as treacherous and unpredictable as Hedda herself. Not everything works, but Thompson is glorious – all weaponised ennui, languid malice and impeccable tailoring.

Regretting You

(116 mins, 12A) Directed by Josh Boone; starring Allison Williams, Mckenna Grace, Dave Franco

The actress Allison Williams is known for her returning role in the camp AI killer-doll horror franchise M3gan, and for an unsettling performance in Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Her latest picture is as terrifying, in its way, as any of her previous genre work. But since Regretting You is an adaptation of a pulpy romantic melodrama written by Colleen Hoover, we must assume that the chilling aspects of this dead-eyed, hollow-souled schmaltz fest were not intentional.

Josh Boone directs, and even the knowledge that his previous work includes the teen cancer tear-jerker The Fault in Our Stars can’t prepare you for the unrelenting dreadfulness of this picture. Everything – from the haunt-your-dreams horror of the digital de-ageing technology that makes poor Dave Franco’s face look partially melted, to the creepily insincere performances and final gouge-out-your-own-eyes-in-embarrassment big romantic statement – is all utterly ghastly.

Love+War

(95 mins, 15) Directed by Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin; featuring Lynsey Addario

Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi, the Oscar-winning husband and wife directing team behind the documentaries Free Solo (about a climber’s bid to scale El Capitan in Yosemite without ropes) and The Rescue (about the Thai cave rescue), and the Jodie Foster-starring feature film Nyad, return with another powerful film about a driven, idealistic individual facing unimaginable challenges.

Love+War is a gripping documentary about the Pulitzer prize-winning conflict photographer Lynsey Addario. Like Addario herself, the film strikes a delicate balance between covering her frontline work – Addario is followed on recent trips to document the Ukraine war, but is particularly well known for her work in Afghanistan – and her role as a wife, to former Reuters journalist Paul de Bendern, and as a mother to two young sons.

Photographs by Courtesy of AP/Prime/Paramount Pictures