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Presented 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 compact set at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the rock star came out separately, but to the same clip of introductory track: the initial lyrics of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, in the end, the production of this LP that forms the core for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which casts White as Springsteen at a pivotal point in the singer’s personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s conversation, guided by Edith Bowman, focused on the complex method of embodying Springsteen, and the inescapable oddity of art meeting life.

Springsteen – the whole time, a portrait of serene calm – mentioned first catching a glimpse of White during a rehearsal at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was dressed in white attire, so he was simple to notice,” he remembered. “I just kind of waved him to the stage and we greeted each other.” White was already thoroughly versed in Springsteen’s music, had watched hours of concert videos, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an opportunity for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a live performer, and to discuss some of the specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered 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 prepared, he really asked scarcely any inquiries.”

It was an challenging character to accept, White said. He referred repeatedly to the immense volume of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of learning he had to acquire, and spoke of “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘nervousness that set, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of effort was going into the music aspect of the film” … Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere.

For all the learning 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 firm. 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 gaining assurance … connecting deeply to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re reading 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 nicest guitar you can practice with,” White says. He commenced guitar lessons, via Zoom, with touring guitarist 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 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 thoughts about the film were initially more straightforward. “I figured 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 embrace more chances, in your work and in your life in general.” It helped that Cooper was “a genuine 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 gathered pace, it maybe became stranger. Springsteen came to the filming location often, apologising to White each time he arrived. “It’s gotta be really strange with the guy’s silly presence 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 wags his finger and signals dissent.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s choice; he knew that the actor was ready to represent the most introspective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera tracked his personal thoughts,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a well-known phrase, but he’s a rock star.”

When he first saw White playing him, he was impressed by the actor’s approach. “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 somehow it strongly connects to my story and myself.” He considered it something akin to his own approach to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives vary significantly from his own. “You have to discover the part of them that is part of you.”

More disconcerting was the way the film pushed him to reexamine difficult periods 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 strange; Springsteen explained 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 impactful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – portraying his volatile early years, when he endured unrecognized mental health issues and had a drinking problem, and the sensitivity and kindness of his later years.

Springsteen recounted watching an early viewing in the presence of his sister, who held his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she retained every memory”. At the end, she looked at him and said: “Isn’t it amazing that we have that?”

There was an parallel, perhaps, of the emotion Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You create an utopian space for three hours,” he addressed the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a fantasy world. It’s a very believable world. It has all the wonderful and terrible parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of transcendence that my audience carries away. And with luck it stays with them for as long as they need it.”