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Marketed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and offering “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen arrived on the compact set at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the music icon walked on separately, but to the same clip of entrance music: the starting verses of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, in the end, the making of this album that forms the core 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 exchange, moderated by Edith Bowman, centered around the complex method of transforming into the star, and the inescapable oddity of art meeting life.

Springsteen – throughout, a image of serene calm – 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 remembered. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already thoroughly versed in Springsteen’s music, had studied countless recordings of concert footage, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a greater understanding of Springsteen as a onstage artist, and to discuss some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered preparing 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 thoroughly briefed, he really asked scarcely any inquiries.”

It was an intimidating role to accept, White said. He referred repeatedly to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of preparation he had to take on, and mentioned “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘nervousness that set, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of focus was going into the sonic element of the film” … Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere.

For all the study he engaged in, it was through the tunes that he really bonded with the part. “A lot of my energy was going into the audio dimension of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected me to vocalize and handle the guitar, and I said, ‘I don’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was insistent. White accordingly recorded his own interpretations of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the vocal chamber, singing Nebraska, and building self-belief … feeling close 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 absorbing Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. Everything’s right there.”

Springsteen also presented White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the closest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the finest guitar you can start with,” White says. He commenced 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 lack the 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 at first simpler. “I thought I’m 76 years old, I have few worries 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 interested in,” he said. “Not your standard musical biopic, but more of a personality-focused story with music.”

As the project progressed, it possibly became odder. Springsteen appeared on location often, saying sorry to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s gotta be really weird with the guy’s silly presence standing there,” he said. But he enjoyed 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 gestures in disagreement and shakes his head.

Springsteen had few doubts about White’s choice; he understood that the actor was equipped to depict the most reflective 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 acting as him, he was impressed by the actor’s approach. “His performance was totally from the inner self outward, not just selecting traits and adopting them superficially,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but in some way it deeply corresponds to my story and myself.” He saw it as something similar to his own method 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 disconcerting was the way the film compelled him to revisit challenging times in his own life. The rebuilding 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 described how often he returned to the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was remarkable, and extremely moving.”

Similarly, it was “a very impactful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – capturing his volatile early years, when he endured unidentified mental health issues and had a drinking problem, and the fragility and kindness of his later years.

Springsteen recounted watching an early viewing 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 looked at him and said: “Isn’t it wonderful that we have that?”

There was an reflection, possibly, of the emotion Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an ideal world for three hours,” he informed the small crowd before him last night. “It’s not a imaginary place. It’s a very credible world. It has all the joyful and painful parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of uplift that my audience takes with them. And ideally it remains with them for as long as they need it.”