This story contains mild spoilers for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.

I’m a big Bruce Springsteen fan. Having written about his music, I think I might even be allowed to call myself a professional Bruce Springsteen fan. So when a new biopic—Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, starring Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen—was announced, I was very excited to see how the cinematic treatment might introduce legions of new-fans-in-waiting to the genius of The Boss and his music.

Then I saw the film. In a word: bad. In two words: really bad. In relating the story of Springsteen refusing to capitalize on the enormous success of The River to instead record Nebraska, a commercially-unfriendly lo-fi acoustic album, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere leans on a host of clichés and generalities that communicate nothing of what makes the man such a singular talent, and slots them into a plot and structure that generate no sense of tension or desire for resolution for its audience.

I was gutted. I wanted, so painfully badly, for it to be good, and instead it was… this. Well. Never again. In the name of Never Again, we’ve decided, as a way of perhaps salvaging some useful slivers of previous metal from the dysfunctional wreckage of this film, to set out some lessons that other biopics of beloved musicians may wish to follow. Heed these lessons, oh music biopic directors. Heed them for the sake of all the disappointed fans out there. We can—we must—do better.

8) Moments of artistic inspiration are not necessarily cinematic

These moments are probably the worst offenders, cliché-wise. I don’t know where they found an edition of Flannery O’Connor with her name printed so enormously on the front cover, but Bruce picking it up and thoughtfully studying the pages like they might contain directions to the Ark of the Covenant is, sadly, completely representative of every other moment in which the film shows us a thousand-watt lightbulb going off in Bruce’s head.

There’s the one where he happens upon Terrence Malick’s Badlands while flicking channels and— what else—leans forward attentively from the sofa, inspiration throbbing from his eyes. The one where he writes “Why??” in his notebook after learning about the murder that would become the basis for Nebraska‘s title track. The one where he crosses out every instance of a third-person “he” and replaces it with an “I” in the same song’s scribbled lyrics, and the one where he scribbles “Double album??” in that same notebook, to show us that many of the songs that went on to form Nebraska and its tonally-antithetical follow-up Born in the USA were conjured in the same period. The camera lingers over these moments, highlighting them in neon pink and shouting them in your face. It’s very hard to make someone having an idea entertaining. Don’t do it. But if you must—don’t do it like this.

7) Something being true doesn’t make it interesting

People do sometimes speak in clichés and generalities. So it may well be that Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau explained the significance of Bruce’s new project to his wife with words as meaningless as “These songs are deeply personal” (you’d fucking hope so, Jon), or back to Bruce himself by saying “You tapped into something… incredibly powerful.” But when the critical analysis stops there, maybe it’s better to pretend Landau said something a little more insightful.

Similarly, you’d really like to think that if a girlfriend of Springsteen’s did have a little play on a glockenspiel and then turn to him and say “I’d say I’m a natural” (as Odessa Young’s Faye does in the film), someone capable of writing the lyrics to “Thunder Road” might come up with a slightly more interesting response than “Yeah… definitely a natural.” Bruce’s close involvement in the making of the film means it’s reasonably likely that he did ratify these kinds of statements as being something that was said, but the bar for whether or not something should go in the film needs to be set a little higher than “Did this or something like it happen?” Somewhere closer to “Does this in any way advance the story or our understanding of any of the characters?” might be a start.