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Marketed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and offering “a special guest”, there was scarcely any astonishment when Bruce Springsteen showed up on the small stage at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the rock star walked on separately, but to the same clip of opening tune: the starting verses of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, after all, the creation of this album that forms the core for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which casts White as Springsteen at a decisive juncture in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s talk, guided by Edith Bowman, focused on the detailed approach of embodying Springsteen, and the unavoidable peculiarity of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – the whole time, a image of serene calm – recalled first catching a glimpse of White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was simple to notice,” he remembered. “I just beckoned him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already deeply immersed in Springsteen’s music, had studied countless recordings of concert material, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an occasion for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a concert act, and to talk over some of the specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered steeling himself for an questioning that failed to materialize: “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 challenging character to undertake, White said. He mentioned often to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information out there, the amount of preparation he had to acquire, and discussed “the strain I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘nervousness that solidified, 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 study he undertook, it was through the songs that he really bonded with the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the musical side of the film,” he said. “[Scott] asked me to sing and play the guitar, and I said, ‘I am not skilled in those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was adamant. White accordingly recorded his own versions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the booth, singing Nebraska, and gaining assurance … relating strongly to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re going through 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 closest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the finest guitar you can start with,” White says. He started guitar lessons, via Zoom, with session player JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so thrilled to learn guitar with you,” White remembered stating on their first meeting. “We don’t have 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 feelings about the film were at first simpler. “I reasoned 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 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 drawn to,” he said. “Not your standard musical biopic, but more of a character-driven drama with music.”

As the project progressed, it maybe became odder. Springsteen visited the set often, apologising to White each time he showed up. “It’s gotta be really odd with the guy’s stupid ass 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 good-looking?’” In the seat beside him, White gestures in disagreement and expresses denial.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s choice; he knew that the actor was ready to represent the most reflective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera followed his internal life,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a cliche, but he’s a rock star.”

When he first saw White playing him, he was impressed by the actor’s approach. “His performance was entirely from the inner self outward, not just picking elements and adopting them superficially,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but nevertheless it deeply corresponds to my story and myself.” He viewed 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 disturbing was the way the film compelled him to revisit challenging times in his own life. The reconstruction of his grandparents’ home in Freehold, New Jersey – a house he once described as “the finest and most tragic sanctuary I’ve ever known” was uncanny; Springsteen described how often he saw the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was remarkable, and quite wonderful.”

Similarly, it was “a very emotional thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – portraying his turbulent early years, when he suffered undiagnosed mental health issues and had a drinking problem, and the sensitivity and tenderness of his later years.

Springsteen shared watching an early showing in the presence of his sister, who clutched his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she remembered everything”. At the end, she turned to him and said: “Isn’t it amazing that we have that?”

There was an reflection, perhaps, 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 select group before him last night. “It’s not a fictional universe. It’s a very believable world. It has all the beautiful and awful parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of elevation that my audience carries away. And hopefully it remains with them for as long as they need it.”