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Marketed as a conversation with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen appeared on the small stage at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the music icon came out separately, but to the matching segment of opening tune: the starting verses of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, ultimately, the making of this LP that provides the focus for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which features White as Springsteen at a pivotal point in the singer’s personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s exchange, steered by Edith Bowman, focused on the detailed approach of embodying Springsteen, and the inevitable strangeness of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – the whole time, a portrait of reptilian poise – spoke of first catching a glimpse of White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was dressed in white attire, so he was simple to notice,” he noted. “I just beckoned him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert material, and perused many interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a onstage artist, and to explore some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered bracing himself for an inquiry that failed to materialize: “I thought this guy is really gonna be interested in me …” he said. In the end, however, “Jeremy was so prepared, he really asked hardly any queries.”

It was an intimidating role to undertake, White said. He mentioned often to the immense volume of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of study he had to absorb, 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 learning he undertook, it was through the music itself that he really bonded with the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the audio dimension of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected me to perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I don’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was insistent. 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 reading a great script, your job is straightforward,” he said. “And when you’re absorbing Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. It’s all 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 commenced guitar lessons, via Zoom, with session player JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so eager to learn guitar with you,” White remembered stating 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 feelings about the film were originally simpler. “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 embrace more chances, in your work and in your life in general.” It helped that Cooper was “a true blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be interested in,” he said. “Not your conventional musical biopic, but more of a character-driven drama with music.”

As the project gathered pace, it perhaps became stranger. Springsteen visited the set often, expressing regret to White each time he arrived. “It’s gotta be really strange with the guy’s silly presence standing there,” he said. But he liked 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 gestures in disagreement and signals dissent.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s choice; he was aware 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 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 affected by the actor’s method. “His performance was totally from the core personality, not just picking elements and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but nevertheless it greatly relates to my story and myself.” He viewed it as something similar to his own approach 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 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 returned to the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was remarkable, and very beautiful.”

Similarly, it was “a very emotional thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – depicting his unpredictable early years, when he experienced unrecognized mental health issues and had a drinking problem, and the vulnerability and kindness of his later years.

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

There was an parallel, possibly, of the sensation Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You build 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 plausible world. It has all the wonderful and terrible parts of life … But ideally there’s an element of elevation that my audience carries away. And ideally it stays with them for as long as they need it.”