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Marketed as a discussion with Jeremy Allen White, and offering “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 actor and the music icon entered separately, but to the same clip of opening tune: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, ultimately, the creation of this record that forms the core for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which features White as Springsteen at a critical moment in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s talk, steered by Edith Bowman, revolved around the detailed approach of becoming Bruce, and the inescapable oddity of art meeting life.

Springsteen – throughout, a picture of cool composure – spoke of first spotting White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was wearing all white, so he was simple to notice,” he remembered. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we exchanged hellos.” White was already deeply immersed in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert footage, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an occasion for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a concert act, and to discuss some of the specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen reflected preparing himself for an inquiry 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 hardly any queries.”

It was an challenging character to undertake, White said. He spoke frequently to the immense volume 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 ‘anxiety 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 learning he engaged in, it was through the tunes that he really bonded with the part. “A lot of my attention was going into the audio dimension of the film,” he said. “[Scott] asked me to sing and play the guitar, and I said, ‘I am not skilled in those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was firm. White duly recorded his own versions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the booth, singing Nebraska, and gaining assurance … feeling close to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re going through a great script, your job is very easy,” he said. “And when you’re examining 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 nicest guitar you can practice with,” White says. He began guitar lessons, via Zoom, with session player JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so eager to learn guitar with you,” White remembered stating on their first meeting. “We don’t have 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 thoughts about the film were originally more straightforward. “I reasoned I’m 76 years old, I am not overly concerned 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 helped 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 character-driven drama with music.”

As the project progressed, it perhaps became more unusual. Springsteen came to the filming location often, saying sorry to White each time he arrived. “It’s gotta be really strange with the guy’s silly presence standing there,” he said. But he enjoyed 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 wags his finger and expresses denial.

Springsteen had few doubts about White’s casting; he was aware that the actor was equipped to portray the most reflective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera captured his personal thoughts,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a common saying, but he’s a music icon.”

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 selecting traits and applying them externally,” he said. “It’s a non-imitative performance, but somehow it greatly relates to my story and myself.” He considered it something akin to his own way to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives are very different from his own. “You have to locate the part of them that is part of you.”

More disconcerting was the way the film forced 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 finest and most tragic sanctuary I’ve ever known” was uncanny; Springsteen explained how often he visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was remarkable, and extremely moving.”

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

Springsteen recounted watching an early showing in the company 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 feeling Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You create an utopian space for three hours,” he addressed the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a fictional universe. It’s a very plausible world. It has all the joyful and painful parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of transcendence that my audience brings home. And ideally it lingers in their minds for as long as they need it.”