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Presented as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen showed up on the intimate platform at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the music icon walked on separately, but to the matching segment of opening tune: the starting verses of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, after all, the making of this LP that forms the core for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which sees White as Springsteen at a pivotal point in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s exchange, moderated by Edith Bowman, centered around the complex method of becoming Bruce, and the unavoidable peculiarity of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – throughout, a portrait of cool composure – spoke of first catching a glimpse of White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was dressed in white attire, so he was simple to notice,” he recalled. “I just kind of waved him to the stage and we exchanged hellos.” White was already thoroughly versed in Springsteen’s music, had studied countless recordings of concert videos, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an occasion for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a concert act, and to explore some of the specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered bracing himself for an inquiry that failed to materialize: “I thought this guy is really gonna be interested in me …” he said. In the end, however, “Jeremy was so well-read, he really asked very few questions.”

It was an challenging character to take on, White said. He mentioned often to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information out there, the amount of study he had to absorb, and discussed “the stress I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘worry that hardened, maybe, into focus.’”

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

For all the learning he engaged in, it was through the tunes that he really bonded with the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] wanted me to perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I don’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was adamant. White promptly 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 … feeling close to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re studying a great script, your job is quite simple,” he said. “And when you’re reading Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. All the elements are right there.”

Springsteen also gave White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the nearest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the best guitar you can start with,” White says. He commenced guitar lessons, via Zoom, with session player JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so eager to learn guitar with you,” White noted expressing on their first meeting. “We lack the 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 thoughts about the film were at first more straightforward. “I reasoned 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 accept greater hazards, 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 typical musical biopic, but more of a personality-focused story with music.”

As the project gathered pace, it perhaps became stranger. Springsteen appeared on location often, expressing regret to White each time he arrived. “It’s has to be really odd with the guy’s silly presence standing there,” he said. But he appreciated what he saw: “I’ve said this before, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that handsome?’” In the seat beside him, White gestures in disagreement and signals dissent.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s casting; he understood that the actor was ready to represent the most reflective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera followed his inner world,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a common saying, but he’s a music icon.”

When he first saw White playing him, he was affected by the actor’s approach. “His performance was totally from the core personality, not just choosing characteristics and applying them externally,” he said. “It’s a non-imitative performance, but in some way it strongly connects to my story and myself.” He saw it as something similar to his own approach to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives differ so greatly from his own. “You have to locate the part of them that is part of you.”

More disconcerting was the way the film compelled him to revisit challenging times in his own life. The reconstruction of his grandparents’ home in Freehold, New Jersey – a house he once described as “the greatest and saddest sanctuary I’ve ever known” was uncanny; Springsteen recounted how often he visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was remarkable, and very beautiful.”

Similarly, it was “a very powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – portraying his unpredictable early years, when he experienced unidentified mental health issues and had a drinking problem, and the sensitivity and sweetness of his later years.

Springsteen shared watching an early screening in the attendance of his sister, who clutched his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she retained every memory”. At the end, she turned to him and said: “Isn’t it marvelous 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 utopian space for three hours,” he informed the small crowd before him last night. “It’s not a fantasy world. It’s a very credible world. It has all the joyful and painful parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of elevation that my audience brings home. And with luck it remains with them for as long as they need it.”