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Billed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and offering “a special guest”, there was scarcely any astonishment when Bruce Springsteen appeared on the intimate platform at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the music icon came out separately, but to the same clip of introductory track: the starting verses of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, ultimately, the making of this record 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 personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s exchange, steered by Edith Bowman, centered around the complex method of transforming into the star, and the inevitable strangeness of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – consistently, a picture of serene calm – recalled first spotting White during a sound check at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was readily visible,” he recalled. “I just kind of waved him to the stage and we greeted each other.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert material, and perused many interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a live performer, and to talk over some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen reflected preparing 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 well-read, he really asked very few questions.”

It was an daunting part to undertake, White said. He spoke frequently to the immense volume of Springsteen information out there, the amount of learning he had to absorb, and discussed “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘worry 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 research he pursued, it was through the music itself that he really related to the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the musical component 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 interpretations of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the booth, singing Nebraska, and finding some confidence … relating strongly 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 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 professional musician JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so excited 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 sentiments about the film were initially simpler. “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 embrace more chances, in your work and in your life in general.” It aided that Cooper was “a genuine 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 moved forward, it perhaps became odder. Springsteen came to the filming location often, expressing regret 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 said this before, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that handsome?’” In the seat beside him, White gestures in disagreement and signals dissent.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s choice; he was aware that the actor was ready to portray 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 common saying, but he’s a stage legend.”

When he first saw White playing him, he was struck by the actor’s approach. “His performance was totally from the core personality, not just selecting traits and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but nevertheless it greatly relates to my story and myself.” He saw it as something akin 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 unsettling was the way the film compelled him to reexamine difficult periods 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 strange; 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 powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – capturing his volatile early years, when he suffered unidentified mental health issues and consumed alcohol excessively, and the vulnerability and sweetness of his later years.

Springsteen shared watching an early screening in the attendance of his sister, who grasped 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 feeling Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an ideal world for three hours,” he addressed the small crowd before him last night. “It’s not a imaginary place. It’s a very plausible 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 ideally it stays with them for as long as they need it.”