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Marketed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and hinting at “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen showed up on the intimate platform at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the rock star entered separately, but to the matching segment of opening tune: the initial lyrics of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, ultimately, the production of this album that forms the core for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which sees White as Springsteen at a decisive juncture in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s exchange, guided by Edith Bowman, revolved around the complex method of becoming Bruce, and the inescapable oddity of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – consistently, a portrait of serene calm – recalled first sighting White during a rehearsal at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was simple to notice,” he recalled. “I just beckoned him to the stage and we greeted each other.” White was already deeply immersed in Springsteen’s music, had watched hours of concert videos, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a enhanced comprehension of Springsteen as a onstage artist, and to explore some of the details of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen reflected steeling himself for an interrogation that never arrived: “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 hardly any queries.”

It was an challenging character to undertake, White said. He referred repeatedly to the sheer weight of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of study he had to take on, and spoke of “the strain I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘worry that set, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of focus 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 songs that he really related to the part. “A lot of my energy was going into the musical side of the film,” he said. “[Scott] asked me to perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I can’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was insistent. White promptly recorded his own renditions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the vocal chamber, singing Nebraska, and finding some confidence … relating strongly to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re going through a great script, your job is straightforward,” he said. “And when you’re reading Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. Everything’s 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 finest guitar you can learn on,” White says. He commenced guitar lessons, via Zoom, with touring guitarist JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so excited to learn guitar with you,” White noted expressing 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 sentiments about the film were initially less complicated. “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 take more risks, 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 intrigued by,” he said. “Not your conventional musical biopic, but more of a individual-centered narrative with music.”

As the project gathered pace, it possibly became odder. Springsteen came to the filming location often, saying sorry to White each time he arrived. “It’s gotta be really strange with the guy’s silly presence standing there,” he said. But he appreciated 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 wags his finger and signals dissent.

Springsteen had few doubts about White’s selection; he understood that the actor was ready to represent the most reflective 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 music icon.”

When he first saw White portraying him, he was impressed by the actor’s technique. “His performance was totally from the inner self outward, not just choosing characteristics and applying them externally,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but nevertheless it deeply corresponds to my story and myself.” He saw it as something like his own approach 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 disturbing was the way the film compelled him to reexamine challenging times in his own life. The recreation 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 strange; Springsteen explained how often he visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was quite a miracle, and quite wonderful.”

Similarly, it was “a very powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – portraying his volatile early years, when he experienced unidentified mental health issues and drank heavily, and the vulnerability 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 turned to him and said: “Isn’t it wonderful that we have that?”

There was an echo, perhaps, of the sensation Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You build an ideal world for three hours,” he informed the select group before him last night. “It’s not a fictional universe. It’s a very credible world. It has all the joyful and painful parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of elevation that my audience carries away. And with luck it lingers in their minds for as long as they need it.”