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Marketed as a conversation with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen showed up on the compact set at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the rock star entered separately, but to the matching segment of entrance music: the initial lyrics of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, in the end, the production 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, revolved around the complex method of transforming into the star, and the unavoidable peculiarity of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – the whole time, a picture of serene calm – mentioned first spotting White during a rehearsal at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was easy to spot,” he recalled. “I just beckoned him to the stage and we greeted each other.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had watched hours of concert material, and consumed numerous interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an occasion for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a live performer, and to discuss some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen reflected preparing himself for an questioning 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 intimidating role to take on, White said. He referred repeatedly to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information available, the amount of preparation he had to take on, and mentioned “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘anxiety that hardened, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of energy was going into the sonic element 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 connected to the part. “A lot of my attention was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected me to vocalize and handle the guitar, and I said, ‘I can’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 building self-belief … connecting deeply 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 absorbing Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. Everything’s right there.”

Springsteen also presented White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the most similar 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 thrilled to learn guitar with you,” White noted expressing on their first meeting. “We are pressed for time to learn the guitar,” Simo answered. “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 feelings about the film were originally more straightforward. “I reasoned I’m 76 years old, I have few worries 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 true 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 individual-centered narrative with music.”

As the project moved forward, it possibly became odder. Springsteen visited the set often, saying sorry to White each time he showed up. “It’s must 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 wags his finger and expresses denial.

Springsteen had few doubts about White’s choice; he knew that the actor was prepared to depict the most reflective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera followed his internal life,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a cliche, but he’s a stage legend.”

When he first saw White acting as him, he was impressed by the actor’s technique. “His performance was totally from the inner self outward, not just choosing characteristics 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 method to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives differ so greatly from his own. “You have to find the part of them that is part of you.”

More unsettling was the way the film pushed him to reexamine hard phases in his own life. The reconstruction 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 eerie; Springsteen recounted how often he returned to the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was remarkable, and extremely moving.”

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

Springsteen recounted watching an early showing in the attendance of his sister, who grasped his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she recalled all details”. At the end, she faced him and said: “Isn’t it marvelous that we have that?”

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