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Marketed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was hardly any shock when Bruce Springsteen arrived on the small stage at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the music icon entered 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 production of this record that serves as the centerpiece for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which features White as Springsteen at a decisive juncture in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s talk, guided by Edith Bowman, centered around the intricate process of embodying Springsteen, and the unavoidable peculiarity of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – throughout, a portrait of reptilian poise – mentioned first catching a glimpse of White during a audio test 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 said hi.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had studied countless recordings of concert videos, and perused many interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an occasion for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a live performer, and to talk over some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered preparing 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 thoroughly briefed, he really asked hardly any queries.”

It was an challenging character to undertake, White said. He referred repeatedly to the immense volume of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of learning he had to acquire, and mentioned “the strain 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 music aspect of the film” … Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere.

For all the learning he pursued, it was through the tunes that he really related to the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the musical side 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 firm. White promptly recorded his own interpretations of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the vocal chamber, singing Nebraska, and finding some confidence … feeling close 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 examining Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. All the elements are 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 practice with,” White says. He began guitar lessons, via Zoom, with professional musician JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so excited to learn guitar with you,” White recalled saying 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 thoughts 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 take more risks, in your work and in your life in general.” It helped that Cooper was “a genuine blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be intrigued by,” he said. “Not your typical musical biopic, but more of a personality-focused story with music.”

As the project moved forward, it maybe became odder. Springsteen visited the set often, expressing regret to White each time he arrived. “It’s must be really odd with the guy’s stupid ass 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 attractive?’” In the seat beside him, White shakes his head and signals dissent.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s selection; he knew that the actor was ready to represent 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 rock star.”

When he first saw White portraying him, he was struck by the actor’s method. “His performance was entirely from the core personality, not just picking elements and adopting them superficially,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but somehow it deeply corresponds to my story and myself.” He viewed 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 pushed 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 greatest and saddest sanctuary I’ve ever known” was strange; Springsteen explained how often he visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was remarkable, and extremely moving.”

Similarly, it was “a very emotional thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – portraying his turbulent early years, when he endured undiagnosed mental health issues and drank heavily, and the fragility and tenderness of his later years.

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

There was an reflection, possibly, of the emotion Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You create an utopian space for three hours,” he told the select group before him last night. “It’s not a fictional universe. It’s a very plausible world. It has all the wonderful and terrible parts of life … But hopefully there’s an element of elevation that my audience brings home. And hopefully it remains with them for as long as they need it.”