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Marketed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and hinting at “a special guest”, there was hardly any shock when Bruce Springsteen arrived on the small stage at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the music icon entered separately, but to the same clip of introductory track: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, after all, the making of this LP that forms the core for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which features White as Springsteen at a critical moment in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s conversation, guided by Edith Bowman, focused on the intricate process of embodying Springsteen, and the inevitable strangeness of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – the whole time, a portrait of cool composure – spoke of first sighting White during a rehearsal at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was dressed in white attire, so he was easy to spot,” he remembered. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert material, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an occasion for a enhanced comprehension of Springsteen as a live performer, and to explore some of the details of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered steeling 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 well-read, he really asked very few questions.”

It was an intimidating role to undertake, White said. He spoke frequently to the sheer weight of Springsteen information out there, the amount of learning he had to take on, and spoke of “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘worry that set, 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 pursued, it was through the tunes that he really related to the part. “A lot of my energy 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 accordingly recorded his own versions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the recording space, singing Nebraska, and gaining assurance … connecting deeply to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re studying a great script, your job is straightforward,” he said. “And when you’re reading Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. All the elements are right there.”

Springsteen also sent White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the most similar he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the nicest guitar you can start with,” White says. He started guitar lessons, via Zoom, with professional musician JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so thrilled to learn guitar with you,” White recalled saying on their first meeting. “We are pressed for 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 thoughts about the film were originally more straightforward. “I reasoned 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 benefited that Cooper was “a real blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be interested in,” he said. “Not your typical musical biopic, but more of a character-driven drama with music.”

As the project moved forward, it perhaps became odder. Springsteen appeared on location often, expressing regret to White each time he arrived. “It’s has to be really odd with the guy’s stupid ass 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 attractive?’” In the seat beside him, White gestures in disagreement and expresses denial.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s casting; he understood that the actor was prepared to portray 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 affected by the actor’s method. “His performance was entirely from the inside out, not just choosing characteristics and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but somehow it strongly connects to my story and myself.” He considered it something akin to his own method to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives are very different from his own. “You have to locate the part of them that is part of you.”

More disturbing was the way the film pushed him to reexamine 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 strange; Springsteen described how often he visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was truly wondrous, and extremely moving.”

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

Springsteen shared watching an early viewing in the attendance of his sister, who held his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she recalled all details”. At the end, she turned to him and said: “Isn’t it marvelous that we have that?”

There was an parallel, maybe, of the emotion Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You create an utopian space for three hours,” he informed the select group before him last night. “It’s not a fictional universe. It’s a very credible world. It has all the beautiful and awful parts of life … But ideally there’s an element of uplift that my audience carries away. And with luck it remains with them for as long as they need it.”