By Steven Hayward, Special to The Gazette

One of the great detours of contemporary music was made by Bruce Springsteen in the late 1970s.

Fresh off a massive tour following his double album, “The River,” Springsteen eschewed a return to the studio, opting instead to move back to New Jersey where he rented a drab bungalow near the dilapidated house of his childhood.

Maybe he’s depressed, people around him started to think, most particularly his manager, Jon Landau. It wasn’t the easiest topic to address though; he is The Boss, after all. And so Springsteen found himself in a sad bedroom with a funky rug, writing a series of songs that sounded nothing like his previous rock anthems. He then recorded them on a Tascam 144 Portastudio, a very early and very cheap four-track.

He was just experimenting, he told Landau, just getting songs down so he could bring them to the E-Street Band more efficiently.

That was the plan anyway. But when he finished, Springsteen heard something real on the tape, something so pure and authentic he decided it couldn’t be brought into the studio and recreated.

“This tape is the album,” he insisted, and eventually that’s what it became.

The result was “Nebraska,” generally proclaimed to be Springsteen’s greatest record and one of the most beloved and revered rock albums of all time. Even people who hate Springsteen love “Nebraska.”

It’s this strange and ill-advised detour that’s the subject of “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” the new film starring Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong.

There are great things and good things and just OK things about the film, but the most important thing to know is that it’s based on a short, remarkable book of the same name by rock journalist and scholar Warren Zanes.

My advice is to read the book after you see the movie because if you haven’t read the book, you won’t be tempted to turn to the person next to you in the theater and tell them what they’re missing.

I met Zanes about a decade ago when I invited him to Colorado College to lecture about Tom Petty — he had just published the authoritative biography — and then later asked him to teach a class on music journalism.

Zanes owns an impressive resume: he joined his brother Dan’s band, The Del Fuegos, as lead guitarist when he was 17, recorded a few legendary albums, earned a PhD, ran educational and public programs at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and wrote “Dusty in Memphis,” the first volume in the brilliant 33 1/3 Series where a single writer digs into the world of a single album.

When Zanes taught at CC, he had just finished “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” and I have a vivid memory of the first pages I saw.

The book opens with the story of the time Springsteen showed up to a show by The Del Fuegos. It’s a miracle that he’s there at all and, in detailing its miraculousness, Zanes shuttles through Springsteen’s catalog — the haunting roads of thunder, the redemptive uplift that came from a willingness to prove it all night, the improbable triumphant explosion of noise that followed that great pause in the middle of “Rosalita.” But none of that matters to the post-punk irreverent Del Fuegos.

“When our dressing room door opened and Bruce Springsteen walked in,” is how Zanes puts it, “we had one thought: that’s the guy who made ‘Nebraska’.”

It’s that kind of album, and the movie captures some of the ineffable magic that made it such a cult classic. The film shows us the moment when Springsteen crosses out “he” and writes “I” in a song about the Starkweather murders — a shift in point of view through which he connects himself with a literary tradition that includes the nihilistic outsiders of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction.

There’s also material about recording technology and the riddle a cassette tape poses to people who have to turn it into an album for the digital world. Most crucially, there’s a powerful scene near the end in which Landau tells Springsteen that he needs to speak to a professional if he’s going to find a way out of his depression.

We don’t see this kind of moment often enough in films — not quite a rock bottom moment, but the crucial moment just before that, when you have the conversation that will lead to getting help. The film gives it the space it deserves.

As good a film as it is, what’s missing is the wit and insight of Zanes. I’ll restrict myself to a single example from the second half of Zanes’ book, about the song “Born in the USA,” which Springsteen actually records before “Nebraska” is released. That’s one of the most striking things about the “Nebraska” detour — that Springsteen has so many songs in the can that will top the charts but releases “Nebraska” first.

Like everyone who hears it in the studio, Springsteen can tell from the jump that “Born in the USA” is going to be a hit, in no small part because of the piercing staccato of Max Weinberg’s snare drum. It’s a remarkable sound and, at the time, there was talk about the possibility that it might have been a sample, the sound of a snare that could never occur in nature.

This is Zanes’ take on this: “The music business has always generated plenty of rumors regarding human misconduct, but when there are rumors about a drum sound, that tells you something about the impact of a recording.”

That’s Zanes.

“Deliver Me From Nowhere” is a good movie, but Zanes’ book is a work of art, the best piece of writing about music I’ve seen in a decade. Check them both out. In that order.