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Marketed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen appeared on the intimate platform at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the music icon entered separately, but to the same clip of opening tune: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, after all, the production of this album that provides the focus 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 exchange, moderated by Edith Bowman, focused on the intricate process of transforming into the star, and the inevitable strangeness of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – consistently, a portrait of serene calm – recalled 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 recalled. “I just beckoned him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already deeply immersed in Springsteen’s music, had watched hours of concert material, and perused many interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an occasion for a enhanced comprehension 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 interrogation 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 scarcely any inquiries.”

It was an challenging character to take on, White said. He referred repeatedly to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of preparation he had to absorb, and spoke of “the stress I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘nervousness 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 learning he undertook, it was through the songs that he really bonded with the part. “A lot of my attention was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] wanted me to sing and play the guitar, and I said, ‘I am not skilled in those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was adamant. White duly recorded his own renditions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the booth, singing Nebraska, and gaining assurance … 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 absorbing Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. It’s all 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 best 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 noted expressing on their first meeting. “We lack the 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 at first more straightforward. “I figured I’m 76 years old, I am not overly concerned 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 true blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be intrigued by,” he said. “Not your conventional musical biopic, but more of a personality-focused story with music.”

As the project gathered pace, it maybe became odder. Springsteen came to the filming location often, saying sorry to White each time he showed up. “It’s gotta be really strange with the guy’s stupid ass 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 expresses denial.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s choice; he was aware that the actor was ready to portray the most reflective 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 common saying, but he’s a rock star.”

When he first saw White acting as him, he was struck by the actor’s method. “His performance was entirely from the core personality, not just selecting traits and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but in some way it deeply corresponds to my story and myself.” He saw it as something akin to his own method to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives vary significantly from his own. “You have to find the part of them that is part of you.”

More unsettling was the way the film forced him to reexamine hard phases in his own life. The recreation of his grandparents’ home in Freehold, New Jersey – a house he once described as “the greatest and saddest sanctuary I’ve ever known” was eerie; Springsteen recounted how often he returned to 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 experienced unidentified mental health issues and had a drinking problem, and the fragility and tenderness of his later years.

Springsteen told of watching an early screening in the company 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 amazing that we have that?”

There was an echo, possibly, of the emotion Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You build an utopian space for three hours,” he told the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a imaginary place. It’s a very believable world. It has all the joyful and painful parts of life … But ideally there’s an element of uplift that my audience carries away. And with luck it lingers in their minds for as long as they need it.”