Kathryn Bigelow brings back the nuclear panic movie.

Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’ Gets the Big-Screen Treatment

Before we get to The Boss and then The Nukes: On today’s Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, I previewed awards season with Katey Rich and Christopher Rosen of The Ankler, discussed the Ankler Pundits Oscar prediction game, and staked out a line in the sand. We must, I repeat must, nominate Delroy Lindo for an Oscar for his work in Sinners. The man has been snubbed long enough! Listen here:

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Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere review

‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ (MovieStillsDB)

As someone who both appreciates Walk Hard’s deconstruction of the musical biopic’s tropes and also understands that the tropes exist because the tropes work—people like tropes or they wouldn’t become tropes!—I was kind of surprised by how hard and how successfully Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere works to avoid them. My full review is here, but this gets to the heart of the matter:

Yes, we hit some of the familiar biopic beats. Springsteen’s home life, with his drunk, abusive father Douglas (Stephen Graham) and desperate, unhappy mom Adele (Gaby Hoffmann) sets the stage and undergirds most of what follows. There’s a girl, Faye (Odessa Young), whom Bruce meets, woos, and inevitably abandons. There is heartbreak and struggle and, ultimately, triumph.

But [director Scott] Cooper is after something a little different here. This isn’t a movie about a rise and fall and rebirth, as so many musically inclined biopics are. It’s a snapshot of an artist in flux, one reaching for new avenues of artistic inspiration. One doesn’t imagine Bruce Springsteen, American bard, prone on a floor, absorbing the band Suicide’s debut self-titled album, to the consternation of his in-home musical engineer. It is, in a way, a movie about movies, though not in the self-congratulatory sense we often think of such pictures. No, Deliver Me From Nowhere is not, strictly speaking, “about” the movies Badlands or The Night of the Hunter. But it is, at least in part, about how Terrence Malick’s and Charles Laughton’s films helped Springsteen channel his own emotions, helped him grapple with the darkness on the edge of his own soul.

And it is, ultimately, about how successfully channeling those influences isn’t enough to stave off that darkness. We tend to think of artists as biomechanical machines that input adversity and excrete salvation, but Cooper’s film builds toward a revelation that, frankly, I didn’t see coming, even knowing a fair amount of Springsteen’s story and a little about the making of this album. Again, I can envision certain audiences sitting there and stoically saying, “Okay, that’s it? Well, that’s not for me.” I, on the other hand, found it to be a tremendously moving portrait of fathers and sons and the search for self-worth even in the face of tremendous success.

Again, you can read the rest here. I understand why some folks are wary of this film and this genre, but it’s a real deviation from the norm and, I think, one that works. It is, like Springsteen’s album Nebraska itself, kind of spiky. It won’t be for everyone. But I dug it. And you might too.

A House of Dynamite review

‘A House of Dynamite’ (MovieStillsDB)

I’ve seen a handful of folks dismiss Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite as a TV movie, and while I don’t think that’s entirely fair—yes, it’s going to be watched by most people on Netflix, but it is both riveting and sprawling, even as it is shot mostly in shaky-cam closeup that calls to mind the tenser moments of 24—there is one way in which it absolutely feels like a TV movie. It is pure, uncut, 1980s nuclear paranoia cinema of the sort that was routinely featured on television in the Reagan era.

A House of Dynamite tracks the reaction by the U.S. military and officials in Washington to an unprovoked ICBM launch from somewhere in the Pacific. The source of the missile is unclear—it could have been the Russians, the Chinese, or the North Koreans—but its target is very obvious: us. The United States. Chicago, to be exact, as the missile’s parabola becomes clearer to our targeting computers.

The question, then, becomes how to respond. Try to shoot it down, sure, but the odds of that succeeding aren’t great. Target the country of origin? Well, what if our satellites have been blinded and can’t reveal who fired it? Should we initiate a defensive launch of our B-2 fleet to retaliate if more missiles come or launch a pre-emptive strike designed to wipe out the total nuclear forces of every nation the missile could have originated from? The possibilities, nearly endless; the death toll, unimaginable. But the future of humanity is in the hands of these men and women, and your chest will get tighter and tighter the closer and closer the missile gets to Chicago. Its effectiveness rests in its simplicity, and its simplicity rests in its totality: one wrong move and the world ends.

To describe the film as star-studded isn’t quite right—Idris Elba, playing the president, is probably the biggest name in the movie—but it is filled with reliably familiar faces who float in the liminal space between “Movie Star” and “That Guy”: Rebecca Ferguson, Jason Clarke, Jared Harris, Anthony Ramos, Greta Lee, Willa Fitzgerald, Kaitlyn Dever, and Tracy Letts all have key roles. As such, the movie it immediately calls to mind is 1983’s The Day After, which offered up a ground-eye’s view of what nuclear war would look like and starred everyone from Jason Robards to Steve Guttenberg.¹

But A House of Dynamite reminds me a bit more of Countdown to Looking Glass. A Canadian TV production released in 1984 by HBO, that film recounted a nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia over the Strait of Hormuz as told through the lens of a network news television broadcast. Countdown to Looking Glass didn’t hew quite as tightly to the broadcast format as Edward Zwick’s Special Bulletin (1983), on which the filmmakers were required to put a disclaimer warning folks that we weren’t really experiencing nuclear terror. But Countdown captures the same sense of uncertainty as A House of Dynamite, that weird gray space between understanding and escalation that is what all nuclear nightmares are based on.

Because the real fear of nuclear annihilation was never truly about an obvious full-scale conflict, both sides simply letting everything fly in the midst of open war. It wasn’t even the hellish aftermath the survivors would face, as depicted in the BBC drama Threads (1984). No, the fear of nuclear annihilation always came from the latent terror that we would accidentally destroy it all. That brinkmanship and escalation would inevitably tip us over into the “everyone loses” portion of game theory. This is the lesson of WarGames (1983) after all: “The only winning move is not to play.”

Which is all well and good, but the simple fact is that the chess pieces remain on the board and will remain there in perpetuity. We are unlikely ever to see complete disarmament, and as tensions mount with Russia and as China gets hit by a destabilizing depopulation wave and as Iran continues to seek nuclear capabilities as North Korea continues to, well, exist, the fear of accidental annihilation isn’t going anywhere. Yes, A House of Dynamite feels like a relic of the 1980s. But it’s relevant and terrifying because the past isn’t done with us.

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Speaking of “That Guy” actors, we discussed Michael Stuhlbarg on this week’s bonus episode of Across the Movie Aisle. I’m kind of surprised he didn’t show up in A House of Dynamite! But he’s great in After the Hunt, a movie that Alyssa, Peter, and I seemed to like more than the average critic. As a reminder, we have spun ATMA off from The Bulwark, but we’re still on Substack and main episodes are still free to listen to.

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Assigned Viewing: Rounders (Kanopy)

‘Rounders’ (MovieStillsDB)

We’re talking Rounders on the Bulwark Movie Club this week; it is a fascinating flick in that it was perfectly timed not to be a big hit but to have long-lasting influence. It came out right before the poker boom kicked off by Chris Moneymaker winning the World Series of Poker and the rise of online poker. The script, written by David Levien and Brian Koppelman, is too dense and filled with poker jargon for novices, but it’s the sort of movie that plays perfectly on rewatch after you’ve gone down the poker rabbit hole yourself. And it stars Matt Damon and Edward Norton just a hair before they became genuine A-Listers (the film was in production during the release of Good Will Hunting, for which Damon would win a screenwriting Oscar with Ben Affleck).

If you’re into gambling, as Sarah and I might be just a little bit, and you came of age during the 1990s indie cinema boom, it’s a seminal movie. It should be streaming on Kanopy; check with your local library to see if you can sign up for it. Or rent it for $4 on Amazon!

1. If you haven’t read it, check out the essay our former Bulwark colleague A.B. Stoddard wrote in 2023 to mark the fortieth anniversary of The Day After—which her father, a TV executive, signed off on.