What to Watch This Friday: Biopics, Brawlers, and Gravity-Defying Docs

This Friday’s streaming lineup is small but stacked: a Bruce Springsteen biopic fronted by Jeremy Allen White, Dwayne Johnson stepping into one of his rawest roles yet in The Smashing Machine, and Alex Honnold once again arguing with gravity in a new Netflix climbing doc. If you’re trying to plan a weekend watchlist that balances prestige, adrenaline, and pure pop-culture curiosity, this is one of those quietly loaded Fridays that rewards a little curation.


Collage of Friday TV and streaming picks highlighted by TVLine
TVLine’s Friday highlights lean into music legends, combat sports, and high-altitude thrills.

Jeremy Allen White in “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere”

The headline release of the day is Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, a Bruce Springsteen biopic centered on the making of his stark 1982 masterpiece Nebraska. Casting Jeremy Allen White—who’s ridden the one-two punch of Shameless and The Bear to full-on cultural ubiquity—feels less like stunt casting and more like a statement: this isn’t going to be a jukebox victory lap, it’s a story about a working-class artist wrestling with his own mythology.

Where most music biopics crash into the same tropes—troubled childhood, meteoric fame, fall from grace, triumphant comeback—this one is built around a quieter creative crisis. Nebraska was famously recorded as rough demos on a four-track cassette; Springsteen chose to release those instead of the full-band E Street versions, trading arena bombast for haunted Americana minimalism. That decision is the emotional spine of the film.

Spotlight on a lone microphone in a dark recording studio, evoking Bruce Springsteen’s stripped-down Nebraska era
A biopic about the Nebraska era is less about stadium glory and more about solitary, uncomfortable honesty.

Culturally, it’s arriving at a moment when legacy-artist stories are everywhere—Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, Elvis, Back to Black—but younger audiences have also rediscovered Springsteen through playlists and prestige TV needle drops. Anchoring the film to a single creatively risky album lets the story function as both music history and a more intimate character study of a man deciding what kind of icon he wants to be.

“What makes Nebraska so haunting isn’t just the darkness of its stories, but the sense that Springsteen is trying to decide whether fame has cost him the right to tell them.”

Expect the film to lean heavily on:

  • Process over spectacle: songcraft, studio tension, and the choice to strip things down instead of going bigger.
  • Class and identity: Springsteen’s lifelong push-pull between blue-collar authenticity and rock-god status.
  • Performance-driven drama: White’s knack for haunted, tightly wound characters is tailor-made for an artist mid-identity crisis.

On the downside, biopics about canonized figures often fight against inevitability; we know Born in the U.S.A. and the stadium tours are coming. The challenge—and potential weakness—will be whether the movie can make this chapter feel genuinely suspenseful rather than dutiful connective tissue in the legend everyone already knows.

For more background on the source material, see the Springsteen film entry on IMDb and recent coverage from Rolling Stone.


“The Smashing Machine”: Dwayne Johnson Gets Bruised and Human

Sharing the spotlight is The Smashing Machine, with Dwayne Johnson stepping into the life of legendary mixed martial artist Mark Kerr. Based on the acclaimed 2002 documentary of the same name, this dramatized version promises something we rarely get from Johnson these days: a performance that’s less superhero, more self-destructive human being.

Kerr’s story—Pride FC glory, addiction struggles, complicated relationships—sits at the crossroads of combat sports and tragedy. It’s closer in spirit to The Wrestler or Foxcatcher than the glossy, quippy action vehicles that made Johnson a global brand. The role asks him not just to bulk up (he already lives there) but to scale back the charisma and play a man whose body is marketed as indestructible while his personal life is anything but.

MMA fighter in a cage under harsh arena lights, representing the brutal world of The Smashing Machine
Behind every “unbeatable” fighter brand is a messy, very breakable human being.

Thematically, The Smashing Machine lands in a media moment obsessed with the costs of performance—physical, emotional, and financial. From UFC Embedded to boxing docs on Netflix, audiences are used to peeking behind the cage door, but this project has the advantage of an already respected non-fiction blueprint and a star with something to prove as a dramatic actor.

“Mark Kerr wasn’t just fighting opponents; he was fighting the demands of an industry that treats pain as content.” — early critic reaction

Where it could stumble is in balance. There’s always a risk that a film like this either:

  • Romanticizes the brutality and self-destruction as a necessary price of greatness, or
  • Leans so hard into cautionary-tale territory that the actual thrill of the sport goes flat.

The sweet spot is a story that acknowledges the visceral charge of combat sports while still interrogating the system around them—the promoters, the fans, and the idea that “toughness” means never saying no to one more round.

Check out the film’s details and release info on IMDb or via HBO/Max’s official pages for additional behind-the-scenes material.


Alex Honnold Returns: Netflix’s Latest Death-Defying Climb

Rounding out the day, Netflix leans into its adventure-doc sweet spot with a new project following Alex Honnold, the free solo climber who broke out of niche climbing culture and into mainstream awareness after the Oscar-winning Free Solo. The elevator pitch is simple and chilling: once again, Honnold is scaling rock faces that most people would get nervous just seeing in drone footage.

Post-Free Solo, the cultural stakes have changed. We’re no longer watching an unknown climber chase a seemingly impossible feat; we’re watching a man whose risk tolerance has become a global debate. Every new project he takes on raises the same questions: Where is the ethical line for documenting extreme danger? At what point does the audience’s fascination start to feel like complicity?

Honnold’s climbs blur the line between inspirational and uncomfortable to watch.

As with earlier climbing docs, expect a blend of:

  • Breathtaking aerial cinematography built for 4K TVs.
  • Technical breakdowns of routes, holds, and weather windows.
  • Personal interludes with Honnold’s family and fellow climbers, who often function as the audience’s anxious conscience.
“Watching Alex Honnold climb is like watching a magic trick where the magician keeps reminding you that the gun is loaded.”

The potential weak spot for this new outing is familiarity. After years of YouTube channels, Instagram clips, and full-length climbing docs, Netflix has to find new psychological ground if it wants to avoid feeling like a gorgeous retread. The most interesting material, historically, has been less about the climbs themselves and more about what happens when a person who lives at the edge of risk tries to build something resembling a normal life.

For more details and episode info, visit the series page on Netflix or its IMDb listing.


How to Prioritize Your Friday Watchlist

If you don’t have time to watch everything, here’s a simple, vibe-based ranking to triage your evening:

  1. “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” – Best for when you want a slow-burn, performance-driven drama and you’re in the mood to think about art, fame, and the stories we tell about “authenticity.”
  2. “The Smashing Machine” – Queue this up if you want intensity and are curious to see Dwayne Johnson break his own blockbuster mold with something more bruised and vulnerable.
  3. Alex Honnold’s new Netflix doc – Ideal as a late-night stunner: visually spectacular, anxiety-inducing, and easier to drop in and out of if you’re multitasking.
This Friday’s choices are less about volume and more about intensity: music, violence, and vertical terror.

Whether you gravitate to music biopics, combat sports dramas, or high-altitude nonfiction, this particular Friday encapsulates a very 2020s streaming truth: platforms aren’t just fighting for your time, they’re competing to see who can make you feel the most—nostalgia, adrenaline, or vertigo—before you doomscroll away.


Final Thoughts: A Quietly Stacked Friday

None of these releases are four-quadrant blockbusters, but together they form a nicely chaotic snapshot of where screen culture is right now: reverent about music history, newly skeptical about the cost of violent spectacle, and still irresistibly drawn to people who treat death as an occupational hazard. If you sample even one of these this weekend, you’re getting more than background noise—you’re getting a conversation starter.

Person sitting on a couch at night with city lights outside, watching TV with a remote in hand
However you line up your queue, this Friday’s releases are built to linger in your head long after the credits roll.

Looking ahead, expect more of this mix: splashy star vehicles cushioned by niche-but-potent docs and character-driven dramas. The algorithms may be chaotic, but when days like this land, they’re definitely working in our favor.