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Billed as a discussion with Jeremy Allen White, and hinting at “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen arrived on the intimate platform at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the music icon entered separately, but to the matching segment of introductory track: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, ultimately, the production of this record that serves as the centerpiece for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which sees White as Springsteen at a pivotal point in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s talk, moderated by Edith Bowman, focused on the intricate process of transforming into the star, and the inevitable strangeness of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – throughout, a portrait of cool composure – spoke of first spotting White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was easy to spot,” he recalled. “I just kind of waved him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already deeply immersed in Springsteen’s music, had studied countless recordings of concert videos, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an opportunity for a greater understanding of Springsteen as a onstage artist, and to discuss some of the specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen reflected preparing himself for an interrogation that did not come: “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 daunting part to undertake, White said. He referred repeatedly to the immense volume of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of learning he had to absorb, and discussed “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘nervousness that solidified, 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 pursued, it was through the tunes 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 am not skilled in those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was firm. 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 building self-belief … connecting deeply to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re studying a great script, your job is straightforward,” he said. “And when you’re examining Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. It’s all 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 eager to learn guitar with you,” White noted expressing on their first meeting. “We don’t have time to learn the guitar,” Simo replied. “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 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 benefited that Cooper was “a true 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 individual-centered narrative with music.”

As the project progressed, it maybe became more unusual. Springsteen appeared on location often, expressing regret to White each time he arrived. “It’s must be really weird 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 handsome?’” In the seat beside him, White wags his finger and shakes his head.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s casting; he understood that the actor was equipped to portray the most reflective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera captured his inner world,” 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 acting as him, he was affected by the actor’s method. “His performance was completely from the core personality, not just choosing characteristics and adopting them superficially,” he said. “It’s a original 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 differ so greatly from his own. “You have to find the part of them that is part of you.”

More disconcerting was the way the film forced him to revisit challenging times 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 uncanny; Springsteen recounted how often he returned to the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was truly wondrous, and quite wonderful.”

Similarly, it was “a very powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – depicting his unpredictable early years, when he experienced undiagnosed 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 company of his sister, who grasped his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she retained every memory”. At the end, she faced him and said: “Isn’t it marvelous that we have that?”

There was an parallel, perhaps, of the sensation Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You build an ideal world for three hours,” he told the small crowd before him last night. “It’s not a imaginary place. It’s a very plausible world. It has all the beautiful and awful parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of uplift that my audience brings home. And ideally it lingers in their minds for as long as they need it.”