The concept for a Bruce Springsteen biopic is so easy, it would take five seconds to cook up.

It's the story of a scruffy kid from Jersey taking the bus to New York City with his guitar in 1972 to audition for John Hammond at CBS.

Or, you jump to 1975 and you capture Springsteen in the midst of creating his breakout masterpiece "Born to Run."

Or 1984, as the newly muscled star towers over the music scene with "Born in the U.S.A."

Sometimes Hollywood surprises you. "Deliver From Me Nowhere" finds a dark spot between the "Born" albums, settling in late 1981 when Bruce is back from the triumphant tour supporting "The River," hitting a low point in his emotional life while writing what may be his most powerful and least commercial album, "Nebraska."

What took place in that starkly furnished bedroom in Colts Neck, N.J., was chronicled in "Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska," the 2023 book by Warren Zanes, The Del Fuegos guitarist who went on to become a music journalist, college instructor, former vice president of education and public programs for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, and executive director of Steven Van Zandt's Rock and Roll Forever Foundation.

"For a writer to see a process like this unfold in the way that it has is damn near mystical," Zanes said in a phone interview Wednesday, a day before the film screens in Pittsburgh. "I never thought in the process of writing that the end result would be the book's adaptation as a film. Never once."

When he was first approached by Eric Robinson, one of the fim's producers, Zanes was downright dismissive of the idea.

"I was quick to say, 'It's not going to happen,'" he said, "because you need Bruce Springsteen's life rights and you need to clear all that music. And if this was something Bruce wanted to do, it would have been done already. So, I wasn't exactly the producer's dream when he reached out to me, but I was telling it like it is."

Robinson, however, persisted, and the dream escalated when he and his partner, producer Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, got director Scott Cooper ("Out of the Furnace," "Hostiles," "Antlers") involved.

"Together," Zanes said, "we drafted a one-page description of what we thought a 'Nebraska' movie could be, and that went to Bruce and [his manager] Jon Landau. And the real turning point was when Bruce said, 'I want to do this.' And then the unthinkable started to be thinkable, right? Paul Schrader posted after he saw this movie, and he was like, 'There were 1,000 things that could have gone wrong, and it's amazing that they didn't.' "

The challenge of bringing this story to the screen is that "Nebraska" is the furthest thing from a feel-good album, from the guy known to a lot of people for slinging the baseball in the "Glory Days" video or mixing it up with Courteney Cox in "Dancing in the Dark."

Zanes devotes 334 pages to the spare, lonely, stark 1982 album rife with sketches of murderers, drifters and otherwise hopeless people, inspired by Springsteen's exposure to the Terrence Malick film "Badlands," the cold-blooded stories of Flannery O'Connor and the haunting music of Suicide. They weren't redemption stories. They were songs flowing out of a depressed rock star not even intending to make an album. Ultimately, what we would hear were the home demos he made on his TEAC 144.

"It was so clearly not a thing of the Top 40," Zanes said, "even if that's where Springsteen had gotten. This album sounded nothing like anything else on the Billboard charts. It was way too raw, and that certainly got the punk community's attention. It got the musicians' attention; it got the critics' attention. It didn't get every Bruce Springsteen fan's attention in that, you know, when I use the word risk, there was a real risk. Even if Bruce was on his sixth album, yeah, you can still [mess] up a career.

"And he took that gamble, because it was a given that there were going to be some confused and disappointed fans. I think most of them showed their true colors and demonstrated that they believed in Bruce more than they believed in any single album, and they were going to stick with him, and they did. And a lot of them stuck with him in a way where they let 'Nebraska' get under their skin, and they let it become an important record for them, even if on their first listen they didn't understand it."

As he describes in the book, Zanes, who was in the punk realm as a Del Fuego, saw the album being embraced in the punk/indie community, by people like Scott Kempner of The Dictators and Matt Berninger of The National.

"One of the things that brought Springsteen close to punk is how much it had the spirit of early '50s rock 'n' roll," he said. "So if you look at The Ramones, you can get pretty close to Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent. You can see the tides there, and the same held for Springsteen.

"If you were in New York City and lived in the apartment building next to CBGBs, you might say, 'Oh, Bruce isn't playing at CBGBs, he's playing at this bigger place, he couldn't be punk.' But I think, sound-wise, go through and listen to 'The River' and it's almost more punk in places than a lot of what was associated with British punk. Springsteen, you know, he's a monster guitar player, but he really kind of held that in reserve in order to be closer to classic '50s-based rock 'n' roll."

In the process of writing the book, one of the biggest revelations for Zanes was how much of "Born in the U.S.A." was done when "Nebraska" hit the streets.

"I didn't understand the degree to which they were two-thirds done with 'Born in the U.S.A.,' and then he put it on the shelf for two years. That made me wonder even more about what he was going through, that he could step so far away from the marketplace. He was making the logical follow-up to 'The River,' which would be 'Born in the U.S.A.,' and then he chose the one that didn't make sense to anyone but Bruce Springsteen."

For the reader, the biggest revelation might be how low Springsteen's emotional state was when he got off the high of "The River" tour and found himself alone in that sparsely furnished Colts Neck, N.J., house. We had always thought of Springsteen as part of some big, happy Jersey pack.

"Little Steven has talked about a certain kind of unknowability of Bruce when they were younger," Zanes said, "like there was some part of him that remained beyond anyone's reach. It's like, yes, there's an extroverted part of him, for sure — the bandleader job required that — but there was another part of him that was a very private part. Not to put in too dramatic terms, but when living creatures start to suffer in some way, they often go off by themselves. And it's a sign that something's not right.

"And he was experiencing a decline in mental health, he was grappling with this depression that he didn't yet really have a name for. And when that happens, just as creatures, we go into a heightened isolation, and that can be very dangerous. Talking to him for the book, I said, 'What you did was the kind of thing you shouldn't do alone.' He said, 'Yeah, I didn't know that then.'"

Bringing the book to the screen began with Zanes, Springsteen, Landau and the producers sitting down at Springsteen's home to listen to Cooper's dramatic reading of his script.

"Scott read the entire draft of the script, and he did all the characters," Zanes said. "And we were sitting there, and it was late afternoon, and the sun started to go down, and nobody turned on lights, and Scott was using his phone to read this thing. We got to the end, and it was a really powerful moment."

Springsteen then himself began bringing some of his own touches to the story to be fleshed out by actor Jeremy Allen White, following on the heels of Timothee Chalamet's stellar portrayal of Bob Dylan in "A Complete Unknown."

"I was with Jeremy the other day, and I said, 'You made me understand Bruce Springsteen better,'" Zanes said. "And I can think of no higher compliment for an actor. And he really did do that for me. I was lucky to be able to see Bruce Springsteen seeing Jeremy Allen White being Bruce Springsteen, and I saw the ways in which Bruce supported Jeremy and acted as a guide, but didn't get in his way. But in the process, I came out with a deeper understanding of Bruce and I came out with a deeper understanding of that time in his life and why, if you're going to pick any one time to tell the story of Bruce Springsteen, that's the one. Jeremy Allen White did a remarkable job in bringing this internal experience that Bruce was having up to the surface where we could really see it."

Zanes had the opportunity to sit with The Boss, and another star, for a screening of "Deliver Me From Nowhere."

"It was one of Bruce's screenings," Zanes said, "and he was sitting with John Mellencamp on one side and his sister Virginia on the other, and we were a couple rows behind them. You could see Virginia take Bruce's hand about two-thirds of the way through the film, and she said something to him, and I didn't know what it was until we were out at Telluride. Bruce described that moment and his sister taking his hand and, at the end of the film, saying, 'This is a gift to our family.'"

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