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Billed as a discussion with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was hardly any shock when Bruce Springsteen showed up on the intimate platform at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the music icon came out separately, but to the matching segment of opening tune: the initial lyrics of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, in the end, the creation of this LP that forms the core for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which features White as Springsteen at a decisive juncture in the singer’s personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s exchange, moderated by Edith Bowman, focused on the complex method of becoming Bruce, and the inescapable oddity of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – consistently, a portrait of cool composure – mentioned first spotting White during a sound check at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was wearing all white, so he was easy to spot,” he recalled. “I just casually gestured 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 perused many interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a concert act, and to discuss some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen reflected bracing himself for an questioning that did not come: “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 spoke frequently to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information out there, the amount of learning he had to absorb, and spoke of “the stress I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘anxiety that hardened, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of energy 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 pursued, it was through the tunes that he really bonded with the part. “A lot of my energy was going into the musical side of the film,” he said. “[Scott] wanted 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 recording space, singing Nebraska, and building self-belief … connecting deeply to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re reading a great script, your job is quite simple,” he said. “And when you’re examining Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. All the elements are right there.”

Springsteen also gave 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 learn on,” White says. He started guitar lessons, via Zoom, with touring guitarist 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 more straightforward. “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 moved forward, it possibly became more unusual. Springsteen appeared on location often, apologising to White each time he arrived. “It’s gotta be really odd with the guy’s silly presence standing there,” he said. But he enjoyed what he saw: “I’ve mentioned this previously, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that handsome?’” In the seat beside him, White wags his finger and signals dissent.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s choice; he was aware that the actor was equipped to represent the most introspective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera tracked his internal life,” 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 playing him, he was struck by the actor’s method. “His performance was totally from the inner self outward, not just picking elements and applying them externally,” he said. “It’s a non-imitative performance, but nevertheless it strongly connects to my story and myself.” He considered it something like his own approach to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives vary significantly from his own. “You have to locate the part of them that is part of you.”

More disconcerting was the way the film pushed him to revisit 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 recounted how often he returned to the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was truly wondrous, and extremely moving.”

Similarly, it was “a very emotional thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – portraying his turbulent early years, when he suffered unidentified mental health issues and consumed alcohol excessively, and the sensitivity and kindness 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 retained every memory”. At the end, she turned to him and said: “Isn’t it wonderful that we have that?”

There was an reflection, maybe, of the feeling Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You build an perfect realm for three hours,” he told the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a fictional universe. It’s a very plausible world. It has all the beautiful and awful parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of elevation that my audience takes with them. And hopefully it remains with them for as long as they need it.”