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Presented as a conversation with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was hardly any shock when Bruce Springsteen appeared on the small stage at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the rock star came out separately, but to the matching segment of opening tune: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, in the end, the making of this album that serves as the centerpiece 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 transforming into the star, and the inevitable strangeness of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – the whole time, a portrait of reptilian poise – mentioned first catching a glimpse of White during a sound check at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was wearing all white, so he was easy to spot,” he recalled. “I just kind of waved him to the stage and we greeted each other.” White was already deeply immersed in Springsteen’s music, had studied countless recordings of concert material, and perused many interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a greater understanding of Springsteen as a concert act, and to talk over some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered steeling 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 prepared, he really asked hardly any queries.”

It was an challenging character to take on, White said. He mentioned often to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of preparation he had to acquire, 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 music aspect 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 related to the part. “A lot of my attention 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 adamant. White accordingly recorded his own renditions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the booth, singing Nebraska, and building self-belief … connecting deeply to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re going through a great script, your job is straightforward,” he said. “And when you’re examining Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. Everything’s right there.”

Springsteen also gave White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the most similar 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 professional musician JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so eager to learn guitar with you,” White remembered stating 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 thoughts about the film were initially less complicated. “I figured 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 accept greater hazards, 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 conventional musical biopic, but more of a personality-focused story with music.”

As the project progressed, it maybe became more unusual. Springsteen appeared on location often, saying sorry to White each time he showed up. “It’s has to be really odd with the guy’s stupid ass 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 attractive?’” In the seat beside him, White gestures in disagreement and signals dissent.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s choice; he knew that the actor was equipped to depict the most introspective 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 cliche, but he’s a stage legend.”

When he first saw White portraying him, he was affected by the actor’s technique. “His performance was totally from the core personality, 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 viewed it as something similar to 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 disconcerting was the way the film compelled 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 strange; Springsteen described how often he visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was quite a miracle, and quite wonderful.”

Similarly, it was “a very powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – depicting his volatile early years, when he endured undiagnosed 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 presence 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 amazing that we have that?”

There was an echo, perhaps, of the feeling Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You build an ideal world 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 wonderful and terrible parts of life … But hopefully there’s an element of transcendence that my audience takes with them. And ideally it stays with them for as long as they need it.”