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Billed as a discussion with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “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 identical excerpt of introductory track: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, after all, the creation of this album that provides the focus for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which features White as Springsteen at a critical moment in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s talk, steered by Edith Bowman, centered around the complex method of becoming Bruce, and the unavoidable peculiarity of art meeting life.

Springsteen – the whole time, a image of reptilian poise – mentioned first sighting White during a rehearsal at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was readily visible,” he recalled. “I just kind of waved him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already thoroughly versed in Springsteen’s music, had watched hours of concert videos, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an opportunity for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a live performer, and to explore some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered 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 thoroughly briefed, he really asked hardly any queries.”

It was an challenging character to take on, White said. He mentioned often to the immense volume of Springsteen information out there, the amount of study he had to acquire, and mentioned “the strain I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘worry 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 music itself that he really bonded with the part. “A lot of my energy was going into the audio dimension of the film,” he said. “[Scott] wanted me to perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I can’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was adamant. White promptly recorded his own versions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the booth, singing Nebraska, and building self-belief … connecting deeply to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re studying a great script, your job is very easy,” he said. “And when you’re examining Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. It’s all right there.”

Springsteen also presented White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the nearest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the nicest guitar you can learn on,” White says. He commenced guitar lessons, via Zoom, with session player JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so eager to learn guitar with you,” White noted expressing 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 originally less complicated. “I reasoned 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 aided that Cooper was “a real blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be intrigued by,” he said. “Not your typical musical biopic, but more of a character-driven drama with music.”

As the project progressed, it maybe became stranger. Springsteen appeared on location often, expressing regret to White each time he showed up. “It’s must be really odd with the guy’s stupid ass standing there,” he said. But he appreciated 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 wags his finger and expresses denial.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s selection; he was aware that the actor was ready to represent the most thoughtful time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera tracked his inner world,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a cliche, but he’s a stage legend.”

When he first saw White playing him, he was impressed by the actor’s approach. “His performance was entirely from the core personality, not just picking elements and adopting them superficially,” he said. “It’s a non-imitative performance, but somehow it strongly connects to my story and myself.” He viewed it as 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 unsettling was the way the film compelled 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 described how often he saw 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 powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – depicting his unpredictable early years, when he endured undiagnosed mental health issues and had a drinking problem, and the sensitivity and tenderness of his later years.

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

There was an echo, perhaps, of the sensation Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You create an utopian space for three hours,” he told the select group before him last night. “It’s not a fantasy world. It’s a very plausible world. It has all the joyful and painful parts of life … But ideally there’s an element of transcendence that my audience brings home. And with luck it lingers in their minds for as long as they need it.”