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Presented as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was scarcely any astonishment when Bruce Springsteen arrived on the compact set at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the music icon came out separately, but to the identical excerpt of entrance music: the starting verses of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, in the end, the making of this album that provides the focus for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which features White as Springsteen at a pivotal point in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s conversation, steered by Edith Bowman, focused on the detailed approach of becoming Bruce, and the unavoidable peculiarity of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – consistently, a portrait of cool composure – mentioned first sighting White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was dressed in white attire, so he was easy to spot,” he noted. “I just kind of waved him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already thoroughly versed in Springsteen’s music, had studied countless recordings of concert videos, and consumed numerous interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an opportunity for a enhanced comprehension of Springsteen as a concert act, and to talk over some of the details of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered steeling himself for an questioning that never arrived: “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 daunting part to accept, White said. He referred repeatedly to the immense volume of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of preparation he had to absorb, and discussed “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘nervousness that set, maybe, into focus.’”

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

For all the research he engaged in, it was through the tunes that he really bonded with the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the audio dimension of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected me to perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I am not skilled in those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was firm. White promptly recorded his own versions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the vocal chamber, singing Nebraska, and finding some confidence … 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. It’s all 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 nicest guitar you can practice 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 recalled saying on their first meeting. “We don’t have 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 at first less complicated. “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 take more risks, in your work and in your life in general.” It aided that Cooper was “a genuine 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 maybe became more unusual. Springsteen visited the set often, apologising to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s gotta be really strange with the guy’s stupid ass standing there,” he said. But he liked what he saw: “I’ve stated this earlier, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that attractive?’” In the seat beside him, White gestures in disagreement and shakes his head.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s casting; he was aware that the actor was equipped to represent the most introspective 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 well-known phrase, but he’s a music icon.”

When he first saw White acting as him, he was affected by the actor’s approach. “His performance was entirely from the inner self outward, not just picking elements and applying them externally,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but in some way it deeply corresponds to my story and myself.” He viewed it as something like his own approach to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives are very different from his own. “You have to find the part of them that is part of you.”

More unsettling was the way the film compelled him to return to hard phases in his own life. The rebuilding 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 uncanny; Springsteen explained how often he saw the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was remarkable, and quite wonderful.”

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

Springsteen shared watching an early screening in the company of his sister, who clutched his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she recalled all details”. At the end, she looked at 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 perfect realm 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 beautiful and awful parts of life … But ideally there’s an element of transcendence that my audience carries away. And ideally it stays with them for as long as they need it.”