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Marketed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was scarcely any astonishment when Bruce Springsteen appeared on the compact set at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the music icon 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, ultimately, the making of this album that forms the core for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which sees 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 embodying Springsteen, and the inevitable strangeness of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – the whole time, a picture of cool composure – recalled first sighting White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was simple to notice,” he recalled. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we greeted each other.” White was already thoroughly versed in Springsteen’s music, had studied countless recordings of concert videos, and consumed numerous interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an opportunity for a greater understanding of Springsteen as a live performer, and to talk over some of the details of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen recalled bracing himself for an questioning that did not come: “I thought this guy is really gonna be interested in me …” he said. In the end, however, “Jeremy was so thoroughly briefed, he really asked scarcely any inquiries.”

It was an intimidating role to take on, White said. He spoke frequently to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information available, the amount of learning he had to acquire, and spoke of “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘worry 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 research he pursued, it was through the music itself that he really related to the part. “A lot of my attention was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] wanted me to perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I can’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was insistent. White duly recorded his own renditions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the booth, singing Nebraska, and finding some confidence … 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 absorbing Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. Everything’s right there.”

Springsteen also presented White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the most similar he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the finest guitar you can start with,” White says. He began guitar lessons, via Zoom, with session player JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so excited to learn guitar with you,” White noted expressing on their first meeting. “We are pressed for 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 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 aided 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 personality-focused story with music.”

As the project moved forward, it perhaps became more unusual. Springsteen appeared on location often, expressing regret to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s must be really weird with the guy’s foolish self standing there,” he said. But he liked what he saw: “I’ve mentioned this previously, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that good-looking?’” In the seat beside him, White gestures in disagreement and shakes his head.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s selection; he knew that the actor was ready to represent the most reflective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera followed 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 core personality, not just selecting traits and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a non-imitative performance, but in some way it greatly relates to my story and myself.” He considered it something similar to his own way to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives vary significantly from his own. “You have to locate the part of them that is part of you.”

More disconcerting was the way the film compelled him to revisit hard phases 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 returned to the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was remarkable, and very beautiful.”

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

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

There was an echo, possibly, of the feeling Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You create an utopian space for three hours,” he informed the small crowd before him last night. “It’s not a fantasy world. It’s a very believable world. It has all the beautiful and awful parts of life … But ideally there’s an element of elevation that my audience carries away. And ideally it lingers in their minds for as long as they need it.”