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Presented as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and hinting at “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen showed up on the small stage at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the rock star walked on separately, but to the same clip of entrance music: the starting verses of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, in the end, the production of this album that provides the focus for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which casts White as Springsteen at a critical moment in the singer’s personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s exchange, moderated by Edith Bowman, centered around the complex method of becoming Bruce, and the inescapable oddity of art meeting life.

Springsteen – the whole time, a portrait of serene calm – recalled first catching a glimpse of White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was wearing all white, so he was easy to spot,” he noted. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we exchanged hellos.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had studied countless recordings of concert material, and consumed numerous interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an opportunity for a enhanced comprehension of Springsteen as a live performer, and to talk over some of the details of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered 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 hardly any queries.”

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

“A lot of focus was going into the musical component of the film” … Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere.

For all the learning he undertook, it was through the songs that he really connected to the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected me to perform and strum 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 booth, singing Nebraska, and building self-belief … 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. It’s all right there.”

Springsteen also presented White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the closest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the finest guitar you can start with,” White says. He started guitar lessons, via Zoom, with session player JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so eager to learn guitar with you,” White recalled saying on their first meeting. “We don’t have time to learn the guitar,” Simo replied. “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 simpler. “I thought 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 benefited that Cooper was “a genuine blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be drawn to,” he said. “Not your typical musical biopic, but more of a character-driven drama with music.”

As the project progressed, it perhaps became stranger. Springsteen appeared on location often, saying sorry to White each time he showed up. “It’s gotta be really odd with the guy’s foolish self standing there,” he said. But he liked what he saw: “I’ve said this before, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that good-looking?’” In the seat beside him, White shakes his head and expresses denial.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s choice; he understood that the actor was ready to depict the most thoughtful 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 well-known phrase, but he’s a rock star.”

When he first saw White portraying him, he was affected by the actor’s technique. “His performance was completely from the inside out, not just picking elements and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but somehow it deeply corresponds to my story and myself.” He considered it something akin 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 disconcerting was the way the film pushed him to reexamine difficult periods in his own life. The recreation 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 eerie; Springsteen explained how often he returned to the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was truly wondrous, and quite wonderful.”

Similarly, it was “a very powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – capturing his turbulent early years, when he experienced undiagnosed mental health issues and drank heavily, and the vulnerability and sweetness of his later years.

Springsteen told of watching an early viewing in the attendance of his sister, who clutched 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 parallel, maybe, of the feeling Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You create an ideal world for three hours,” he told the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a imaginary place. It’s a very plausible world. It has all the wonderful and terrible parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of transcendence that my audience brings home. And hopefully it stays with them for as long as they need it.”