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Billed as a discussion with Jeremy Allen White, and offering “a special guest”, there was hardly any shock when Bruce Springsteen appeared on the small stage at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the music icon came out separately, but to the identical excerpt of entrance music: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, ultimately, the production of this album that forms the core for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which sees White as Springsteen at a critical moment in the singer’s personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s conversation, guided by Edith Bowman, revolved around the intricate process of becoming Bruce, and the unavoidable peculiarity of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – consistently, a image of reptilian poise – spoke of first sighting White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was readily visible,” he noted. “I just kind of waved him to the stage and we greeted each other.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert videos, and perused many interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an occasion for a greater understanding of Springsteen as a live performer, and to explore some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered preparing himself for an questioning that did not come: “I thought this guy is really gonna be interested in me …” he said. In the end, however, “Jeremy was so prepared, he really asked very few questions.”

It was an challenging character to undertake, White said. He spoke frequently to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information out there, the amount of learning he had to acquire, and discussed “the stress I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘worry that set, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of focus 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 engaged in, it was through the tunes that he really related to the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the musical side of the film,” he said. “[Scott] wanted me to vocalize and handle the guitar, and I said, ‘I am not skilled in those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was firm. White duly recorded his own interpretations of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the booth, singing Nebraska, and building self-belief … relating strongly 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 sent White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the most similar he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the nicest guitar you can start with,” White says. He started guitar lessons, via Zoom, with session player JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so excited 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 feelings about the film were originally more straightforward. “I figured 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 take more risks, in your work and in your life in general.” It helped that Cooper was “a real blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be drawn to,” he said. “Not your conventional musical biopic, but more of a character-driven drama with music.”

As the project gathered pace, it maybe became odder. Springsteen came to the filming location often, expressing regret to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s has to be really weird with the guy’s stupid ass 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 attractive?’” In the seat beside him, White gestures in disagreement and signals dissent.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s casting; he knew that the actor was equipped to represent the most introspective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera captured 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 playing him, he was affected by the actor’s method. “His performance was totally from the core personality, not just choosing characteristics and adopting them superficially,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but somehow it deeply corresponds to my story and myself.” He considered it something like his own approach to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives differ so greatly from his own. “You have to discover the part of them that is part of you.”

More disconcerting was the way the film forced him to revisit hard phases in his own life. The reconstruction of his grandparents’ home in Freehold, New Jersey – a house he once described as “the best and most sorrowful sanctuary I’ve ever known” was strange; Springsteen recounted how often he returned to the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was remarkable, and quite wonderful.”

Similarly, it was “a very emotional thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – capturing his unpredictable early years, when he suffered unidentified mental health issues and consumed alcohol excessively, and the vulnerability and sweetness of his later years.

Springsteen recounted watching an early screening in the presence of his sister, who held his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she remembered everything”. At the end, she looked at him and said: “Isn’t it marvelous that we have that?”

There was an echo, maybe, of the emotion Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an perfect realm for three hours,” he addressed the select group before him last night. “It’s not a imaginary place. 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 takes with them. And ideally it lingers in their minds for as long as they need it.”