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Marketed as a conversation with Jeremy Allen White, and offering “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen appeared on the small stage at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the rock star entered separately, but to the same clip of entrance music: the initial lyrics of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, ultimately, the production of this LP that forms the core for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which features White as Springsteen at a pivotal point in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s conversation, steered by Edith Bowman, revolved around the detailed approach of transforming into the star, and the inescapable oddity of art meeting life.

Springsteen – the whole time, a portrait of serene calm – mentioned first spotting White during a rehearsal at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was dressed in white attire, so he was readily visible,” he remembered. “I just beckoned him to the stage and we greeted each other.” White was already deeply immersed 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 deeper insight of Springsteen as a concert act, and to talk over some of the details of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen reflected steeling himself for an inquiry 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 very few questions.”

It was an intimidating role to take on, White said. He mentioned often to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information available, 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 hardened, 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 engaged in, it was through the music itself that he really bonded with the part. “A lot of my attention was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected me to sing and play 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 booth, singing Nebraska, and finding some confidence … connecting deeply to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re studying a great script, your job is quite simple,” 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 most similar he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the finest guitar you can practice with,” White says. He began guitar lessons, via Zoom, with session player JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so excited to learn guitar with you,” White remembered stating on their first meeting. “We don’t have time to learn the guitar,” Simo answered. “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 thoughts about the film were initially simpler. “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 accept greater hazards, 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 intrigued by,” he said. “Not your typical musical biopic, but more of a personality-focused story with music.”

As the project gathered pace, it possibly became odder. Springsteen came to the filming location often, expressing regret to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s has to be really strange 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 signals dissent.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s casting; he understood that the actor was ready to portray the most thoughtful 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 stage legend.”

When he first saw White acting as him, he was affected by the actor’s technique. “His performance was completely from the inside out, not just selecting traits and applying them externally,” he said. “It’s a non-imitative performance, but nevertheless it deeply corresponds to my story and myself.” He saw it as something akin to his own way to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives differ so greatly from his own. “You have to discover the part of them that is part of you.”

More disconcerting was the way the film forced him to return to hard phases 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 visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was truly wondrous, and very beautiful.”

Similarly, it was “a very powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – portraying his turbulent early years, when he experienced undiagnosed mental health issues and drank heavily, and the sensitivity and sweetness of his later years.

Springsteen told of watching an early viewing in the presence 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 amazing that we have that?”

There was an echo, perhaps, of the feeling Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You build an perfect realm for three hours,” he informed the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a fantasy world. It’s a very credible world. It has all the joyful and painful parts of life … But ideally there’s an element of transcendence that my audience brings home. And hopefully it stays with them for as long as they need it.”