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Presented as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and offering “a special guest”, there was scarcely any astonishment when Bruce Springsteen appeared on the compact set at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the rock star entered separately, but to the identical excerpt of entrance music: the starting verses of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, after all, the making of this record that provides the focus for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which features White as Springsteen at a decisive juncture in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s conversation, moderated by Edith Bowman, revolved around the intricate process of becoming Bruce, and the unavoidable peculiarity of art meeting life.

Springsteen – the whole time, a picture of cool composure – recalled first sighting White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was readily visible,” he recalled. “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 videos, and consumed numerous 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 details of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered preparing himself for an interrogation 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 scarcely any inquiries.”

It was an intimidating role to undertake, White said. He referred repeatedly to the sheer weight of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of learning he had to take on, and spoke of “the pressure 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 musical component of the film” … Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere.

For all the study he undertook, it was through the songs that he really related to 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 don’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was adamant. White promptly recorded his own interpretations of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the recording space, singing Nebraska, and building self-belief … connecting deeply 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. All the elements are right there.”

Springsteen also gave 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 began guitar lessons, via Zoom, with professional musician JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so thrilled to learn guitar with you,” White recalled saying 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 sentiments about the film were originally less complicated. “I figured 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 helped that Cooper was “a genuine blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be drawn to,” he said. “Not your standard musical biopic, but more of a personality-focused story with music.”

As the project gathered pace, it maybe became more unusual. Springsteen came to the filming location often, expressing regret to White each time he showed up. “It’s gotta be really weird with the guy’s foolish self standing there,” he said. But he liked 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 gestures in disagreement and expresses denial.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s choice; he understood that the actor was prepared to depict the most reflective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera tracked his internal life,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a well-known phrase, but he’s a rock star.”

When he first saw White playing him, he was affected by the actor’s method. “His performance was totally from the inner self outward, 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 considered it something like his own way 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 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 best and most sorrowful sanctuary I’ve ever known” was eerie; Springsteen explained how often he visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was quite a miracle, and extremely moving.”

Similarly, it was “a very impactful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – capturing his unpredictable early years, when he endured unidentified mental health issues and consumed alcohol excessively, and the fragility and tenderness of his later years.

Springsteen told of watching an early viewing in the attendance of his sister, who clutched 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 amazing that we have that?”

There was an parallel, perhaps, of the emotion Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an ideal world for three hours,” he told the intimate audience 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 ideally there’s an element of transcendence that my audience takes with them. And hopefully it stays with them for as long as they need it.”