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Marketed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and offering “a special guest”, there was hardly any shock when Bruce Springsteen arrived on the intimate platform at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the rock star came out separately, but to the same clip of opening tune: the starting verses of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, ultimately, the creation 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 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 becoming Bruce, and the unavoidable peculiarity of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – consistently, a portrait of serene calm – recalled first sighting White during a sound check at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was wearing all white, so he was readily visible,” he remembered. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we greeted each other.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert footage, 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 reflected preparing 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 prepared, he really asked very few questions.”

It was an daunting part to undertake, White said. He mentioned often to the immense volume of Springsteen information out there, the amount of learning he had to take on, and mentioned “the stress I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘anxiety that set, 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 study he engaged in, it was through the songs that he really bonded with the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected me to perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I can’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 recording space, singing Nebraska, and finding some confidence … relating strongly to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re studying a great script, your job is straightforward,” he said. “And when you’re reading Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. All the elements are right there.”

Springsteen also presented 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 learn on,” White says. He began guitar lessons, via Zoom, with session player JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so excited 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 sentiments about the film were at first more straightforward. “I figured 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 take more risks, in your work and in your life in general.” It aided that Cooper was “a genuine 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 character-driven drama with music.”

As the project moved forward, it perhaps became stranger. Springsteen came to the filming location often, expressing regret to White each time he arrived. “It’s has to be really strange with the guy’s stupid ass standing there,” he said. But he enjoyed 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 wags his finger and expresses denial.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s selection; he knew that the actor was ready to represent the most introspective 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 common saying, but he’s a music icon.”

When he first saw White playing him, he was struck by the actor’s technique. “His performance was totally from the inside out, not just selecting traits and applying them externally,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but in some way it greatly relates to my story and myself.” He saw it as something akin to his own approach to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives differ so greatly from his own. “You have to discover the part of them that is part of you.”

More unsettling was the way the film pushed him to return to hard phases in his own life. The rebuilding of his grandparents’ home in Freehold, New Jersey – a house he once described as “the best and most sorrowful sanctuary I’ve ever known” was uncanny; Springsteen explained how often he returned to 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 emotional thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – depicting his volatile early years, when he experienced unrecognized mental health issues and consumed alcohol excessively, and the vulnerability and sweetness of his later years.

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

There was an echo, maybe, of the sensation Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an perfect realm for three hours,” he informed the select group before him last night. “It’s not a fictional universe. It’s a very credible world. It has all the beautiful and awful parts of life … But ideally there’s an element of uplift that my audience brings home. And ideally it stays with them for as long as they need it.”