The film chronicles the making of Bruce Springsteen's 1982 album Nebraska when he was a young musician on the cusp of global superstardom, struggling to reconcile the pressures of success with the ghosts of his past. Recorded on a 4-track recorder in Springsteen's New Jersey bedroom, the album marked a pivotal time in his life and is considered one of his most enduring works—a stark, somber acoustic record portraying the lives of blue-collar workers who try to succeed in life but fail at every turn, while searching for a deliverance that never comes.