Deliver Me From Nowhere, the Scott Cooper-directed biopic about Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, debuted at Telluride on Friday night with Jeremiah Fraites’s emotional score playing for audiences for the first time.
Growing up in New Jersey, Fraites says Springsteen’s music was always part of his landscape—from learning to drive to grabbing meals at late-night diners. “Collaborating with Scott Cooper on Deliver Me From Nowhere was a career high and personal privilege. What Scott has done with this film is rare—he’s captured the quiet fragility and unfiltered honesty of Bruce’s life during the making of Nebraska. It was an honor to support his vision.”
The film chronicles Springsteen’s process of writing and recording the 1982 album on a 4-track recorder in his New Jersey bedroom, and the emotional upheaval he faced as fame grew and his past tangled with the present. Jeremy Allen White plays Springsteen, with Jeremy Strong portraying longtime manager Jon Landau.
Fraites stressed that his aim wasn’t to imitate Springsteen’s sound, but to honor the emotional core of Nebraska. “I didn’t approach the score by trying to imitate Bruce’s sound—there’s no way to replicate that. But the emotional tone of Nebraska—its restraint, its space, its raw honesty—definitely informed the way I thought about the music. It was more about feeling than style.”
To ground the score, Fraites chose an upright piano he jokingly calls Firewood—a beat-up instrument he describes as devalued enough to be burned, which he felt matched Bruce’s story: raw, unvarnished, and rooted in resilience. Its rough edges and worn tone contribute a sense of grit and authenticity that a pristine piano could not.
This fall is shaping up as a busy period for Fraites. He’s also scoring Stephen King’s The Long Walk, due in theaters Sept. 12. Meanwhile, The Lumineers continue their 2025 tour, including a Chicago stop at Soldier Field on Aug. 30 and a Sept. 6 show at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C.
Deliver Me From Nowhere opens wide in theaters Oct. 24.
Context and value: Fraites’s move into feature scoring underscores a growing trend of indie artists moving fluidly between rock, folk, and cinema. By grounding the score in a deliberately imperfect, emotionally honest instrument like Firewood, the film taps into the same restrained atmosphere that defines Nebraska, potentially broadening audiences for both the movie and Fraites’s work with The Lumineers. The collaboration also spotlights how contemporary soundtracks can enhance character-driven storytelling by privileging mood and subtext over recreating a source-era sound. Overall, the project signals a promising expansion of Fraites’s creative horizon and offers fans a fresh lens on a pivotal moment in Springsteen’s career.