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Billed as a discussion with Jeremy Allen White, and offering “a special guest”, there was scarcely any astonishment when Bruce Springsteen showed up on the compact set at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the music icon entered separately, but to the same clip of introductory track: the initial lyrics of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, after all, the creation of this record that forms the core for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which sees White as Springsteen at a critical moment in the singer’s personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s exchange, guided by Edith Bowman, revolved around the complex method of becoming Bruce, and the inescapable oddity of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – consistently, a picture of reptilian poise – spoke of first spotting White during a rehearsal 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 greeted each other.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert videos, and consumed numerous interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an occasion for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a live performer, and to talk over some of the specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen recalled 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 daunting part to take on, White said. He spoke frequently to the sheer weight of Springsteen information out there, the amount of preparation he had to absorb, and spoke of “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘anxiety that solidified, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of energy was going into the musical component 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 related to the part. “A lot of my concentration 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 duly recorded his own interpretations 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 studying a great script, your job is quite simple,” he said. “And when you’re absorbing Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. All the elements are right there.”

Springsteen also gave White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the closest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the best guitar you can start with,” White says. He began guitar lessons, via Zoom, with session player JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so excited to learn guitar with you,” White remembered stating on their first meeting. “We don’t have time to learn the guitar,” Simo answered. “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 at first less complicated. “I figured I’m 76 years old, I am not overly concerned 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 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 individual-centered narrative with music.”

As the project moved forward, it maybe became more unusual. Springsteen appeared on location often, saying sorry to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s has to be really strange with the guy’s foolish self standing there,” he said. But he appreciated what he saw: “I’ve stated this earlier, 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 little uncertainty about White’s selection; he knew that the actor was ready to depict the most introspective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera followed his personal thoughts,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a well-known phrase, but he’s a music icon.”

When he first saw White acting as him, he was struck by the actor’s technique. “His performance was completely from the inside out, not just picking elements and applying them externally,” he said. “It’s a non-imitative performance, but somehow it deeply corresponds to my story and myself.” He saw it as something like his own way to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives are very different from his own. “You have to find the part of them that is part of you.”

More unsettling was the way the film pushed him to return to difficult periods 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 strange; Springsteen explained how often he visited 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 undiagnosed mental health issues and consumed alcohol excessively, and the vulnerability and kindness of his later years.

Springsteen told of watching an early screening in the presence of his sister, who clutched 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 marvelous that we have that?”

There was an parallel, perhaps, of the feeling Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You build an utopian space for three hours,” he addressed the small crowd before him last night. “It’s not a imaginary place. 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 ideally it remains with them for as long as they need it.”