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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 showed up on the intimate platform at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the music icon walked on separately, but to the identical excerpt of opening tune: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, after all, 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 pivotal point in the singer’s personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s exchange, moderated by Edith Bowman, centered around the intricate process of becoming Bruce, and the inevitable strangeness of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – consistently, a picture of serene calm – mentioned first spotting White during a sound check at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was readily visible,” he noted. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we greeted each other.” White was already thoroughly versed in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert videos, and consumed numerous interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a concert act, and to explore some of the specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen reflected 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 prepared, he really asked very few questions.”

It was an daunting part to undertake, White said. He mentioned often to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information out there, the amount of preparation he had to absorb, and mentioned “the strain I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘anxiety that set, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of focus was going into the music aspect of the film” … Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere.

For all the research he undertook, it was through the music itself that he really bonded with the part. “A lot of my energy was going into the audio dimension of the film,” he said. “[Scott] asked me to perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I can’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was firm. 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 quite simple,” he said. “And when you’re reading 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 finest guitar you can start with,” White says. He started 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 don’t have time to learn the guitar,” Simo answered. “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 originally more straightforward. “I thought 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 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 drawn to,” he said. “Not your standard musical biopic, but more of a individual-centered narrative with music.”

As the project gathered pace, it possibly became more unusual. Springsteen appeared on 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 liked what he saw: “I’ve mentioned this previously, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that attractive?’” In the seat beside him, White shakes his head and shakes his head.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s selection; he knew that the actor was prepared to portray the most introspective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera captured his inner world,” 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 portraying him, he was struck by the actor’s method. “His performance was totally from the core personality, not just selecting traits and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but in some way it strongly connects to my story and myself.” He considered it something like his own method 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 greatest and saddest sanctuary I’ve ever known” was strange; Springsteen explained how often he saw 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 – capturing his turbulent early years, when he suffered undiagnosed mental health issues and consumed alcohol excessively, and the fragility and sweetness of his later years.

Springsteen shared watching an early screening in the presence of his sister, who clutched his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she remembered everything”. At the end, she faced him and said: “Isn’t it wonderful that we have that?”

There was an parallel, perhaps, of the emotion Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an utopian space for three hours,” he addressed the select group before him last night. “It’s not a fantasy world. It’s a very plausible world. It has all the beautiful and awful parts of life … But ideally there’s an element of uplift that my audience brings home. And with luck it stays with them for as long as they need it.”