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Billed 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 same clip of introductory track: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, in the end, the making of this record that provides the focus 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, guided by Edith Bowman, centered around the detailed approach of becoming Bruce, and the inevitable strangeness of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – the whole time, a image of serene calm – mentioned first spotting White during a sound check at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was wearing all white, so he was simple to notice,” he recalled. “I just beckoned him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had studied countless recordings of concert videos, and consumed numerous interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a concert act, and to explore some of the particulars 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 very few questions.”

It was an intimidating role to take on, White said. He spoke frequently to the immense volume of Springsteen information available, the amount of learning he had to take on, and discussed “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘anxiety that hardened, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of effort 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 tunes that he really connected to the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the musical side of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected me to perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I can’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was insistent. 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 reading a great script, your job is very easy,” he said. “And when you’re absorbing Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. Everything’s 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 finest guitar you can start with,” White says. He began 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 are pressed for 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 thought 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 real blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be interested in,” he said. “Not your standard musical biopic, but more of a individual-centered narrative with music.”

As the project progressed, it possibly became stranger. Springsteen visited the set often, saying sorry to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s must be really strange with the guy’s foolish self 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 attractive?’” In the seat beside him, White gestures in disagreement and expresses denial.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s casting; he was aware that the actor was equipped to depict the most thoughtful time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera followed his inner world,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a common saying, but he’s a music icon.”

When he first saw White portraying him, he was struck by the actor’s technique. “His performance was completely from the inside out, not just picking elements and adopting them superficially,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but in some way it strongly connects to my story and myself.” He considered it something similar to his own method 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 pushed him to return to difficult periods in his own life. The rebuilding of his grandparents’ home in Freehold, New Jersey – a house he once described as “the greatest and saddest 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 remarkable, and very beautiful.”

Similarly, it was “a very emotional thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – depicting his unpredictable early years, when he suffered unrecognized mental health issues and consumed alcohol excessively, and the fragility and kindness of his later years.

Springsteen told of watching an early showing in the presence of his sister, who grasped 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 wonderful that we have that?”

There was an reflection, 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 fantasy world. It’s a very believable world. It has all the joyful and painful parts of life … But hopefully there’s an element of transcendence that my audience carries away. And with luck it lingers in their minds for as long as they need it.”