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Billed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and offering “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen arrived on the compact set at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the music icon came out separately, but to the matching segment of introductory track: 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 casts White as Springsteen at a critical moment in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s conversation, moderated by Edith Bowman, revolved around the intricate process of embodying Springsteen, and the unavoidable peculiarity of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – the whole time, a picture of reptilian poise – mentioned first sighting White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was wearing all white, so he was readily visible,” he remembered. “I just beckoned him to the stage and we exchanged hellos.” White was already deeply immersed in Springsteen’s music, had studied countless recordings of concert material, and consumed numerous interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an opportunity for a greater understanding of Springsteen as a onstage artist, and to explore some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered steeling 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 thoroughly briefed, he really asked very few questions.”

It was an intimidating role to accept, White said. He mentioned often to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information out there, the amount of preparation he had to take on, and spoke of “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘nervousness that solidified, 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 study he undertook, 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 can’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was firm. White accordingly recorded his own versions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the recording space, singing Nebraska, and building self-belief … 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 closest 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 noted expressing on their first meeting. “We are pressed for 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 at first simpler. “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 accept greater hazards, in your work and in your life in general.” It helped 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 individual-centered narrative with music.”

As the project moved forward, it perhaps became more unusual. Springsteen appeared on location often, apologising to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s must 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 good-looking?’” In the seat beside him, White shakes his head and expresses denial.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s casting; he knew that the actor was prepared to portray 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 acting as him, he was impressed by the actor’s method. “His performance was totally from the inner self outward, not just picking elements and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but in some way it strongly connects to my story and myself.” He saw it as 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 unsettling was the way the film compelled him to revisit hard phases in his own life. The rebuilding 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 visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was truly wondrous, and very beautiful.”

Similarly, it was “a very emotional thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – capturing his unpredictable early years, when he suffered undiagnosed mental health issues and consumed alcohol excessively, and the sensitivity and sweetness of his later years.

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

There was an echo, perhaps, of the feeling Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You build an perfect realm for three hours,” he told the small crowd before him last night. “It’s not a fantasy world. It’s a very credible world. It has all the joyful and painful parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of transcendence that my audience carries away. And hopefully it stays with them for as long as they need it.”