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Presented as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was hardly any shock when Bruce Springsteen showed up on the compact set at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the music icon entered separately, but to the identical excerpt of opening tune: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, ultimately, the creation of this record that forms the core for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which features White as Springsteen at a critical moment in the singer’s personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s exchange, steered by Edith Bowman, focused on the intricate process of embodying Springsteen, and the inescapable oddity of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – the whole time, a portrait of cool composure – spoke of first spotting 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 remembered. “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 material, and perused many interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance 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 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 well-read, he really asked hardly any queries.”

It was an challenging character to accept, White said. He mentioned often to the sheer weight of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of study he had to acquire, and spoke of “the pressure 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 music aspect of the film” … Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere.

For all the research he engaged in, it was through the songs that he really bonded with the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the audio dimension of the film,” he said. “[Scott] wanted me to perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I don’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was firm. 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 … connecting deeply to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re reading a great script, your job is very easy,” he said. “And when you’re examining Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. All the elements are right there.”

Springsteen also sent White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the most similar he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the nicest 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 noted expressing 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 sentiments about the film were originally less complicated. “I reasoned 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 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 interested in,” he said. “Not your conventional musical biopic, but more of a personality-focused story with music.”

As the project moved forward, it perhaps became stranger. Springsteen visited the set often, expressing regret to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s must be really odd 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 handsome?’” In the seat beside him, White shakes his head and expresses denial.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s casting; he knew that the actor was equipped to represent the most reflective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera captured his internal life,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a well-known phrase, but he’s a music icon.”

When he first saw White acting as him, he was affected by the actor’s technique. “His performance was entirely from the core personality, not just picking elements 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 are very different from his own. “You have to discover the part of them that is part of you.”

More disconcerting was the way the film forced him to return to hard phases 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 eerie; Springsteen described how often he visited 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 turbulent early years, when he endured unrecognized mental health issues and consumed alcohol excessively, and the sensitivity and kindness of his later years.

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

There was an echo, possibly, of the sensation Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You build an ideal world for three hours,” he addressed the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a imaginary place. It’s a very believable 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 stays with them for as long as they need it.”