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Billed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen appeared on the compact set at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the music icon came out separately, but to the same clip of entrance music: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, in the end, the making of this LP that provides the focus for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which sees White as Springsteen at a decisive juncture in the singer’s personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s talk, moderated by Edith Bowman, centered around the intricate process of embodying Springsteen, and the inescapable oddity of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – throughout, a picture of cool composure – spoke of first sighting White during a sound check at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was easy to spot,” he noted. “I just kind of waved him to the stage and we exchanged hellos.” 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 opportunity for a greater understanding of Springsteen as a onstage artist, and to talk over some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen reflected preparing himself for an inquiry that never arrived: “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 challenging character to take on, White said. He referred repeatedly to the sheer weight of Springsteen information out there, the amount of learning he had to acquire, and discussed “the strain 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 musical component of the film” … Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere.

For all the learning he pursued, it was through the tunes that he really related to the part. “A lot of my attention was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] asked me to vocalize and handle the guitar, and I said, ‘I don’t do 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 recording space, singing Nebraska, and finding some confidence … relating strongly to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re reading a great script, your job is straightforward,” 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 nearest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the nicest guitar you can learn on,” White says. He started guitar lessons, via Zoom, with professional musician 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 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 feelings about the film were at first less complicated. “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 embrace more chances, 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 intrigued by,” he said. “Not your standard musical biopic, but more of a personality-focused story with music.”

As the project progressed, it perhaps became stranger. Springsteen came to the filming location often, expressing regret to White each time he showed up. “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 handsome?’” In the seat beside him, White shakes his head and signals dissent.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s selection; he knew that the actor was prepared to depict the most introspective 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 portraying him, he was affected by the actor’s approach. “His performance was entirely from the inner self outward, not just choosing characteristics and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but in some way it strongly connects to my story and myself.” He viewed it as something similar to his own way to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives are very different from his own. “You have to discover the part of them that is part of you.”

More disturbing was the way the film pushed 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 best and most sorrowful sanctuary I’ve ever known” was eerie; Springsteen described how often he visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was truly wondrous, and extremely moving.”

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 consumed alcohol excessively, and the fragility and tenderness of his later years.

Springsteen shared watching an early screening in the presence of his sister, who grasped 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 wonderful that we have that?”

There was an reflection, possibly, of the emotion Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You build an perfect realm for three hours,” he addressed the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a fantasy world. It’s a very believable world. It has all the wonderful and terrible parts of life … But hopefully there’s an element of uplift that my audience carries away. And with luck it lingers in their minds for as long as they need it.”