Self-revealing, self-examining, self-mythologizing, self-indulgent and self-destructive, those are all phrases that can apply to Bruce Springsteen’s seminal, uncompromising and defiantly anti-commercial album “Nebraska.”

It can’t be called the LP that “made him.” But this critically-acclaimed smash from 1982 underscored the Bob Dylan comparisons he’d been getting since his ridiculously-hyped 1975 breakout (Time and Newsweek covers the same week) that accompanied “Born to Run” seven years earlier. It underscored the “serious artist” label he craved.

And it didn’t come easily. As Scott Cooper’s new bio-pic “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” makes clear, The Boss was going through some things to get that album in record stores.

“Crazy Heart” Cooper and his star Jeremy Allen White (TV’s “The Bear”) give us a peek into the creative process and the “Daddy issues” that had Springsteen taking inspiration from his Rust Belt childhood, the classic films “Badlands” which he watched over and over on video, and “The Night of the Hunter,” which he’d seen with his abusive, mentally unstable father (Stephen Graham).

The film gets at everything from “My Hometown” to the film career that never was (he was pitched “The Mask,” which was titled “Born in the U.S.A.” by screenwriter Paul Schrader). The not-meant-for-release recording sessions in a lake house in Colt Neck, N.J. and a dalliance with a local single mom (Odessa Young) symbolize the old transitioning to the new.

“Springsteen,” based on a Warren Zane memoir, captures a thirtysomething “bar band” veteran with seven years of growing fame and grueling touring behind him stopping to take a breather, take stock and have something like a breakdown as he grappled with clinging to his Freehold/Asbury Park, New Jersey roots or casting them off.

It’s a brooding performance in a brooding movie, not your conventional rags to riches triumph or Jeremy Allen White Sings The Boss biopic. But White and Cooper make it interesting and entertaining enough to invest in.

Young Bruce (Matthew Anthony Pellicano Jr.) is seen in black and white flashbacks, growing up in Freehold with a father he fears more than adores and a mother (Gabby Hoffman) who can’t fix what ails his father with shouting.

That past weighs heavily on adult Bruce’s mind as he and the E Street Band (a merry gathering of look-alikes) leave the road after “The River” tour and he retreats to a lake house manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) has rented for him to work on new material. Because CBS/Columbia is already screaming for a followup.

“MOMENTUM,” CBS exec Al Teller (David Krumholtz, funny) preaches. That’s what they’re going for, an artist on a roll with decades-long staying power.

Landau might guard Springsteen from those expectations and try to treat this next record as a “process.” But Springsteen, watching TV and musing over themes, landscapes and a sort of murder ballad/prison ballad folk Americana, is torn between the commercial material that this movie pitch offers and the Woody Guthrie/Bob Dylan chronicler of the dark side of The American Soul that he longs to be and which he senses in Terrence Malick’s Charles Starkweather murder spree tone poem movie, “Badlands.”

As The Boss jams with his old friends in Asbury Park on weekends and writes during the week, taking delivery of a new Camaro, waiting for a motorcycle he’s having built for him by one friend and calling in another a tech friend (Paul Walter Hauser) to try out this new four-track “portable studio” cassette deck, he ponders his past if not his future.

That’s how he connects with an old classmate’s kid sister (Young, of “Assassination Nation” and TV’s “The Stand”) who turns out to be a single mom who’s not just a groupie, but a connection to working class Jersey and his roots.

Cooper does a much better job of suggesting what’s pulling Springsteen back down to Earth than the pressures, fear of and allure of super-dooper-stardom that could be staring him in the face.

White does a fair impersonation of Springsteen as a singer, and his interpretation of a man at war with his soul has him keeping Springsteen’s head down or cocked to one side, as if recoiling from that next blow. It’s awfully introverted and for as much screen time as he has for this impersonation, it creates a vacuum at the heart of “Deliver Me from Nowhere.”

Young’s character is merely sketched in with a “Sometimes you miss the things right in front of you” aphorisms. She gives more life to Faye than the script does.

Landau, a music critic who latched onto a rising star and made a career out of being Springsteen’s protector, champion and (in the movie at least) father confessor, is sympathetically written. But one wonders if Strong, who brought the vulpine Roy Cohn to life for “The Apprentice,” has heard gossip about Landau. He plays the manager and future gatekeeper at the Rock’n Roll Hall of Fame as poker-faced with a lower register nebbishy Woody Allen monotone, which makes one grimace at his flash analyses of what ails his meal ticket and his instant dissection of what this album that will come to be named “Nebraska” is really about.

Hauser, of “I, Tonya” and “The Naked Gun” and “Richard Jewell” kind of steals the picture in the absence of anybody else stepping up and really taking over. He’s the can-do gopher who gets the songs on tape, warns Springsteen repeatedly about the quality of analog cassette recording in that day and age and comes off as a hero for helping make the music intimate and primitive.

Former child actress Hoffman doesn’t have many moments to register as the mother. Graham plays the father as a figure of loathing and pity and nobody else (comic Marc Maron is a token presence as recording engineer Chuck Plotkin) has enough to chew on to make much of a mark.

Which leaves us with the creative process and the woman he left behind stories. Not exactly “The Greatest Hits.” Not necessarily the easiest way to make an icon relevent to new generations, either.

But for fans, “Deliver Me from Nowhere” is essential viewing, a Big Man and Big Star wrestling with the same fears and depression that dogs many of us, and having the means and the wherewithal to do something about it, even if that means leaving his roots behind for Los Angeles, a career peak and ageing into the classic rock “older brother’s favorite band” cliche.

Rating: PG-13, domestic violence, sexual situation, profanity

Cast: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Gabby Hoffman, Stephen Graham, Marc Maron and Odessa Young

Credits: Scripted and directed by Scott Cooper, based on a biography by Warren Zane. A 20th Century Studios release.

Running time: 1:59