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Marketed as a conversation with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was hardly any shock when Bruce Springsteen showed up 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 entrance music: the initial lyrics of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, in the end, the production of this LP that serves as the centerpiece for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which features White as Springsteen at a pivotal point in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s exchange, steered by Edith Bowman, focused on the intricate process of transforming into the star, and the unavoidable peculiarity of art meeting life.

Springsteen – throughout, a picture of serene calm – spoke of first catching a glimpse of White during a rehearsal at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was easy to spot,” he recalled. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we exchanged hellos.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert footage, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an occasion for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a live performer, and to discuss 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 very few questions.”

It was an intimidating role to take on, White said. He mentioned often to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information out there, the amount of learning he had to absorb, and discussed “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘nervousness that set, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of effort was going into the sonic element of the film” … Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere.

For all the research he undertook, it was through the tunes that he really related to the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the audio dimension of the film,” he said. “[Scott] asked me to vocalize and handle the guitar, and I said, ‘I can’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was adamant. White accordingly recorded his own renditions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the vocal chamber, singing Nebraska, and gaining assurance … relating strongly to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re going through 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 sent White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the closest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the best guitar you can practice with,” White says. He commenced guitar lessons, via Zoom, with touring guitarist JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so thrilled 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 feelings about the film were originally less complicated. “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 take more risks, in your work and in your life in general.” It benefited that Cooper was “a genuine blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be drawn to,” he said. “Not your typical musical biopic, but more of a character-driven drama with music.”

As the project progressed, it maybe became more unusual. Springsteen came to the filming location often, apologising to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s must be really weird 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 good-looking?’” In the seat beside him, White shakes his head and expresses denial.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s selection; he understood 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 personal thoughts,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a well-known phrase, but he’s a rock star.”

When he first saw White acting as him, he was struck by the actor’s technique. “His performance was completely from the inside out, not just choosing characteristics and applying them externally,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but in some way it strongly connects 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 disconcerting was the way the film pushed him to return to difficult periods 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 recounted how often he visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was quite a miracle, and very beautiful.”

Similarly, it was “a very emotional thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – capturing his turbulent early years, when he endured unidentified mental health issues and drank heavily, 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 retained every memory”. At the end, she turned to him and said: “Isn’t it amazing that we have that?”

There was an echo, perhaps, of the emotion Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an utopian space for three hours,” he informed the small crowd 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 brings home. And hopefully it lingers in their minds for as long as they need it.”