Full spoilers follow.
The setup. In 1981 Bruce wraps The River tour at the peak of his commercial ascent and, rather than capitalize on it, retreats. Jon Landau installs him in a quiet house near Freehold, New Jersey to get him out of the glare. He buys his first new car and begins tinkering with songs at home. What emerges is Nebraska — the sparse 1982 cassette record of killers, drifters and damaged sons that the industry around him did not want and Landau ultimately protected.
The hidden architecture. The film cuts between the recording and black-and-white Freehold, where a young Bruce lives with his mother Adele and a father, Douglas 'Dutch' Springsteen, perpetually on the verge of violence. The structural point becomes clear only in retrospect: every condemned narrator on Nebraska is a proxy. Bruce is writing about his father and himself in the third person because the first person is unavailable to him. The album is not research into American darkness; it is autobiography he cannot sign.
The collapse. Alongside the work, an ordinary life is offered and repeatedly missed. He grows close to Faye Romano — a fictional character created for the film, with Springsteen's approval — and to her young daughter Haley, but his depression makes him only intermittently present. Nothing external goes wrong; that is the point. The sinking happens in the absence of a cause, immediately after the greatest triumph of his career, and the film denies the audience the biopic's usual consolation that the suffering is producing the masterpiece in some redemptive exchange.
The turn. The climax is not a record or a concert. It is Bruce accepting that he cannot bury his demons in music and must confront them in therapy. The decision to seek help is staged as the quiet catalyst that pulls him out of the abyss — deliberately undramatic, and deliberately the opposite of the mythology of the tortured artist who saves himself through work.
The ending. Six months later, Bruce is performing publicly again. Afterward his parents visit him backstage, and Douglas asks to speak with him privately. In the film's emotional payoff, the father acknowledges his faults and apologizes for his failures as a parent. It is enough: Bruce forgives him, and the film closes on a reconciliation with both parents. The meaning that lands only here is that Nebraska was the son's unanswered letter — and the movie's final gesture is to grant it an answer. Critics divided sharply over whether that closure is earned catharsis or a wish fulfilled on the subject's behalf, and the composite nature of Faye is often cited on the skeptical side of that argument.