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Billed as a conversation with Jeremy Allen White, and hinting at “a special guest”, there was scarcely any astonishment when Bruce Springsteen arrived 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, in the end, the production of this album that provides the focus for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which sees White as Springsteen at a pivotal point in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s conversation, moderated by Edith Bowman, centered around the intricate process of transforming into the star, and the inescapable oddity of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – the whole time, a image of cool composure – mentioned first sighting White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was wearing all white, so he was simple to notice,” he noted. “I just kind of waved 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 read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an opportunity for a enhanced comprehension of Springsteen as a live performer, and to talk over some of the details of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered bracing himself for an inquiry that never arrived: “I thought this guy is really gonna be interested in me …” he said. In the end, however, “Jeremy was so well-read, he really asked scarcely any inquiries.”

It was an daunting part to undertake, White said. He mentioned often to the sheer weight of Springsteen information available, the amount of study he had to absorb, and discussed “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘nervousness that hardened, 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 study he pursued, it was through the songs 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 can’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was adamant. White promptly 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 very easy,” he said. “And when you’re absorbing 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 nicest guitar you can learn on,” White says. He commenced guitar lessons, via Zoom, with session player 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 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 simpler. “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 take more risks, in your work and in your life in general.” It benefited that Cooper was “a true 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 character-driven drama with music.”

As the project gathered pace, it possibly became more unusual. Springsteen appeared on location often, saying sorry to White each time he showed up. “It’s must be really odd with the guy’s foolish self standing there,” he said. But he enjoyed what he saw: “I’ve stated this earlier, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that handsome?’” In the seat beside him, White gestures in disagreement and expresses denial.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s selection; he knew that the actor was ready to represent the most thoughtful time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera captured his personal thoughts,” 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 impressed by the actor’s technique. “His performance was totally from the inner self outward, not just selecting traits and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but in some way it deeply corresponds to my story and myself.” He saw it as something similar to his own way 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 unsettling was the way the film compelled 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 finest and most tragic sanctuary I’ve ever known” was uncanny; Springsteen described how often he saw the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was quite a miracle, and extremely moving.”

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 fragility and sweetness of his later years.

Springsteen told of watching an early showing in the attendance of his sister, who held his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she remembered everything”. At the end, she looked at him and said: “Isn’t it wonderful that we have that?”

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