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Presented as a conversation with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was hardly any shock when Bruce Springsteen arrived on the intimate platform at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the music icon walked on separately, but to the same clip of introductory track: the starting verses of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, ultimately, the creation of this LP that provides the focus for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which sees White as Springsteen at a decisive juncture in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s conversation, steered by Edith Bowman, centered around the detailed approach of becoming Bruce, and the inevitable strangeness of art meeting life.

Springsteen – consistently, a portrait of cool composure – spoke of first spotting White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was wearing all white, so he was readily visible,” he remembered. “I just beckoned him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert videos, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a enhanced comprehension of Springsteen as a live performer, and to discuss some of the details of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen reflected bracing himself for an inquiry that did not come: “I thought this guy is really gonna be interested in me …” he said. In the end, however, “Jeremy was so thoroughly briefed, he really asked scarcely any inquiries.”

It was an challenging character to undertake, White said. He referred repeatedly to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information available, the amount of study he had to acquire, and mentioned “the stress I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘anxiety that solidified, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of effort was going into the music aspect of the film” … Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere.

For all the study he pursued, it was through the songs that he really related to the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the musical side of the film,” he said. “[Scott] asked me to perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I can’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was firm. White accordingly recorded his own versions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the recording space, singing Nebraska, and finding some confidence … relating strongly to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re reading a great script, your job is straightforward,” he said. “And when you’re reading Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. Everything’s right there.”

Springsteen also gave White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the closest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the nicest guitar you can learn on,” White says. He started guitar lessons, via Zoom, with session player JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so thrilled to learn guitar with you,” White remembered stating on their first meeting. “We don’t have time to learn the guitar,” Simo responded. “We have time to learn these five Bruce songs.”

Jeremy Allen White and Bruce Springsteen on the set of Deliver Me From Nowhere in 2024.

Springsteen’s own sentiments about the film were initially simpler. “I figured I’m 76 years old, I don’t really care what the fuck I do any more,” he said. “Yeah, go ahead. At my age you embrace more chances, in your work and in your life in general.” It aided that Cooper was “a real blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be interested in,” he said. “Not your standard musical biopic, but more of a character-driven drama with music.”

As the project progressed, it maybe became more unusual. Springsteen visited the set often, apologising to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s must be really odd with the guy’s silly presence standing there,” he said. But he liked what he saw: “I’ve mentioned this previously, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that attractive?’” In the seat beside him, White shakes his head and expresses denial.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s selection; he knew that the actor was ready to portray the most introspective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera tracked his internal life,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a cliche, but he’s a music icon.”

When he first saw White portraying him, he was affected by the actor’s approach. “His performance was completely from the core personality, not just picking elements and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a non-imitative performance, but nevertheless it strongly connects to my story and myself.” He viewed it as something similar to his own approach to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives are very different from his own. “You have to discover the part of them that is part of you.”

More disconcerting was the way the film pushed him to return to hard phases in his own life. The recreation of his grandparents’ home in Freehold, New Jersey – a house he once described as “the finest and most tragic sanctuary I’ve ever known” was strange; Springsteen described how often he returned to the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was truly wondrous, and extremely moving.”

Similarly, it was “a very powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – portraying his unpredictable early years, when he endured unidentified mental health issues and drank heavily, and the sensitivity and tenderness of his later years.

Springsteen told of watching an early screening in the presence of his sister, who grasped his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she retained every memory”. At the end, she looked at him and said: “Isn’t it amazing that we have that?”

There was an reflection, perhaps, of the sensation Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an ideal world for three hours,” he told the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a fictional universe. It’s a very plausible world. It has all the beautiful and awful parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of transcendence that my audience takes with them. And ideally it stays with them for as long as they need it.”