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Marketed as a discussion with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was hardly any shock when Bruce Springsteen appeared 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 opening tune: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, after all, the production of this album that provides the focus for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which casts White as Springsteen at a pivotal point in the singer’s personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s talk, steered by Edith Bowman, revolved around the intricate process of embodying Springsteen, and the inevitable strangeness of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – the whole time, a image of reptilian poise – mentioned first sighting White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was wearing all white, so he was easy to spot,” he noted. “I just kind of waved him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already thoroughly versed in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert footage, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a live performer, and to explore some of the details of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen reflected steeling 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 well-read, he really asked scarcely any inquiries.”

It was an challenging character to accept, White said. He spoke frequently to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of study he had to take on, and mentioned “the stress I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘anxiety that hardened, 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 research he undertook, it was through the music itself that he really bonded with the part. “A lot of my attention was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] asked me to sing and play the guitar, and I said, ‘I am not skilled in those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was firm. White duly 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 … relating strongly to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re reading a great script, your job is quite simple,” he said. “And when you’re examining Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. It’s all right there.”

Springsteen also sent 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 start with,” White says. He commenced guitar lessons, via Zoom, with session player JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so thrilled to learn guitar with you,” White remembered stating 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 less complicated. “I reasoned 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 real blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be intrigued by,” he said. “Not your conventional musical biopic, but more of a personality-focused story with music.”

As the project moved forward, it perhaps became stranger. Springsteen visited the set often, saying sorry to White each time he showed up. “It’s has to be really strange with the guy’s silly presence 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 shakes his head.

Springsteen had few doubts about White’s choice; he was aware that the actor was equipped to portray 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 totally from the inner self outward, not just picking elements and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but in some way it strongly connects to my story and myself.” He viewed it as something akin to his own method 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 pushed him to revisit difficult periods in his own life. The recreation 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 eerie; Springsteen explained how often he returned to the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was truly wondrous, and extremely moving.”

Similarly, it was “a very powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – capturing his volatile early years, when he suffered unrecognized mental health issues and consumed alcohol excessively, and the sensitivity and tenderness of his later years.

Springsteen recounted watching an early showing in the attendance of his sister, who grasped his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she remembered everything”. At the end, she faced him and said: “Isn’t it marvelous that we have that?”

There was an echo, possibly, of the feeling Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You create an utopian space for three hours,” he informed the select group before him last night. “It’s not a imaginary place. It’s a very credible world. It has all the wonderful and terrible parts of life … But hopefully there’s an element of elevation that my audience takes with them. And with luck it stays with them for as long as they need it.”