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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 performer and the music icon walked on separately, but to the matching segment of entrance music: the initial lyrics of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, in the end, the production of this LP that serves as the centerpiece 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 talk, steered by Edith Bowman, centered around the complex method of transforming into the star, and the unavoidable peculiarity of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – the whole time, a portrait of serene calm – 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 recalled. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already deeply immersed in Springsteen’s music, had watched hours of concert material, and perused many 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 specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen recalled 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 prepared, he really asked scarcely any inquiries.”

It was an intimidating role to take on, White said. He referred repeatedly to the sheer weight of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of preparation he had to acquire, and spoke of “the strain I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘anxiety that hardened, 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 connected to the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] wanted 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 versions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the booth, singing Nebraska, and finding some confidence … connecting deeply to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re going through a great script, your job is quite simple,” he said. “And when you’re reading Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. It’s all right there.”

Springsteen also gave White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the closest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the finest guitar you can practice with,” White says. He began guitar lessons, via Zoom, with touring guitarist JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so excited to learn guitar with you,” White remembered stating on their first meeting. “We lack the 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 sentiments about the film were originally less complicated. “I thought I’m 76 years old, I have few worries 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 real 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 character-driven drama with music.”

As the project moved forward, it possibly became stranger. Springsteen visited the set often, saying sorry to White each time he arrived. “It’s has to be really odd 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 handsome?’” In the seat beside him, White shakes his head and signals dissent.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s selection; he understood 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 personal thoughts,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a cliche, but he’s a music icon.”

When he first saw White acting as him, he was impressed by the actor’s technique. “His performance was totally from the inside out, not just choosing characteristics and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but in some way it deeply corresponds to my story and myself.” He saw it as something like his own method to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives vary significantly from his own. “You have to discover the part of them that is part of you.”

More unsettling was the way the film forced him to reexamine 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 uncanny; Springsteen explained how often he returned to the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was remarkable, and quite wonderful.”

Similarly, it was “a very powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – depicting his turbulent early years, when he experienced undiagnosed mental health issues and had a drinking problem, and the fragility and sweetness of his later years.

Springsteen shared watching an early viewing in the presence of his sister, who held his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she retained every memory”. At the end, she looked at 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 establish an ideal world for three hours,” he informed the select group 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 ideally there’s an element of elevation that my audience brings home. And ideally it remains with them for as long as they need it.”