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Presented 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 performer and the rock star entered separately, but to the matching segment of entrance music: the opening lines 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 life and career. Much of the evening’s conversation, moderated by Edith Bowman, focused on the detailed approach of becoming Bruce, and the unavoidable peculiarity of art meeting life.

Springsteen – throughout, a image of cool composure – 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 remembered. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we exchanged hellos.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had watched hours of concert footage, and consumed numerous interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a onstage artist, and to discuss some of the details of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen reflected bracing 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 well-read, he really asked scarcely any inquiries.”

It was an challenging character to accept, White said. He mentioned often to the sheer weight of Springsteen information out there, the amount of study he had to take on, and spoke of “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘anxiety that solidified, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of energy 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 pursued, it was through the songs that he really connected to the part. “A lot of my energy was going into the musical side of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected me to sing and play the guitar, and I said, ‘I don’t do 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 recording space, singing Nebraska, and gaining assurance … connecting deeply to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re reading a great script, your job is straightforward,” he said. “And when you’re reading Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. All the elements are right there.”

Springsteen also sent 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 learn on,” White says. He commenced guitar lessons, via Zoom, with professional musician JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so excited to learn guitar with you,” White remembered stating on their first meeting. “We are pressed for 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 at first more straightforward. “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 take more risks, in your work and in your life in general.” It benefited that Cooper was “a true blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be drawn to,” he said. “Not your standard musical biopic, but more of a character-driven drama with music.”

As the project progressed, it possibly became stranger. Springsteen appeared on location often, apologising to White each time he showed up. “It’s gotta be really strange with the guy’s stupid ass standing there,” he said. But he enjoyed what he saw: “I’ve stated this earlier, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that good-looking?’” In the seat beside him, White wags his finger and shakes his head.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s casting; he knew that the actor was ready to depict the most reflective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera tracked his inner world,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a well-known phrase, but he’s a stage legend.”

When he first saw White playing him, he was struck by the actor’s technique. “His performance was totally from the inside out, not just picking elements and applying them externally,” he said. “It’s a non-imitative performance, but in some way it deeply corresponds to my story and myself.” He saw it as something similar to his own way to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives differ so greatly from his own. “You have to locate the part of them that is part of you.”

More unsettling was the way the film forced him to return to challenging times in his own life. The recreation 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 eerie; Springsteen explained how often he saw the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was quite a miracle, and extremely moving.”

Similarly, it was “a very powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – depicting his volatile early years, when he endured unrecognized mental health issues and consumed alcohol excessively, and the vulnerability and tenderness of his later years.

Springsteen told of watching an early screening in the attendance of his sister, who grasped his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she recalled all details”. At the end, she turned to him and said: “Isn’t it wonderful that we have that?”

There was an reflection, maybe, of the sensation Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You build an ideal world for three hours,” he told the select group before him last night. “It’s not a fantasy world. It’s a very credible world. It has all the joyful and painful parts of life … But ideally 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.”