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Marketed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “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 actor and the rock star entered separately, but to the same clip of entrance music: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, in the end, the creation of this LP that forms the core 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, centered around the intricate process of embodying Springsteen, and the unavoidable peculiarity of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – consistently, a portrait of reptilian poise – recalled first catching a glimpse of White during a sound check at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was easy to spot,” he noted. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we exchanged hellos.” White was already deeply immersed in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert material, and perused many interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an opportunity for a greater understanding of Springsteen as a onstage artist, and to talk over some of the specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered preparing himself for an interrogation 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 hardly any queries.”

It was an challenging character to accept, White said. He referred repeatedly to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of study he had to acquire, and spoke of “the strain I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘worry 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 music itself that he really connected to the part. “A lot of my attention was going into the audio dimension of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected me to sing and play the guitar, and I said, ‘I am not skilled in those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was insistent. White promptly 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 … feeling close to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re studying a great script, your job is quite simple,” he said. “And when you’re reading Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. Everything’s right there.”

Springsteen also presented White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the most similar he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the best guitar you can learn on,” White says. He began guitar lessons, via Zoom, with professional musician JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so eager to learn guitar with you,” White noted expressing 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 initially simpler. “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 accept greater hazards, in your work and in your life in general.” It benefited that Cooper was “a real 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 possibly became odder. Springsteen visited the set often, saying sorry to White each time he showed up. “It’s must be really odd with the guy’s silly presence standing there,” he said. But he liked what he saw: “I’ve stated this earlier, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that attractive?’” In the seat beside him, White gestures in disagreement and expresses denial.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s casting; he was aware that the actor was equipped to depict the most thoughtful 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 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 entirely from the inside out, 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 considered it something similar to his own way to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives vary significantly from his own. “You have to find the part of them that is part of you.”

More disconcerting was the way the film forced him to reexamine hard phases in his own life. The reconstruction 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 recounted how often he visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was quite a miracle, and quite wonderful.”

Similarly, it was “a very impactful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – capturing his turbulent early years, when he suffered undiagnosed mental health issues and had a drinking problem, and the sensitivity and kindness of his later years.

Springsteen told of watching an early viewing in the presence of his sister, who held his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she recalled all details”. At the end, she faced him and said: “Isn’t it wonderful that we have that?”

There was an echo, possibly, of the sensation Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an utopian space for three hours,” he informed the select group before him last night. “It’s not a fantasy world. 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 with luck it lingers in their minds for as long as they need it.”