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Marketed as a conversation with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was hardly any shock when Bruce Springsteen showed up on the small stage at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the rock star came out separately, but to the same clip of opening tune: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, ultimately, 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 pivotal point in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s talk, moderated by Edith Bowman, revolved around the detailed approach of transforming into the star, and the inescapable oddity of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – throughout, a image of cool composure – mentioned first sighting White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was wearing all white, so he was simple to notice,” he recalled. “I just kind of waved him to the stage and we greeted each other.” White was already deeply immersed 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 enhanced comprehension of Springsteen as a concert act, and to discuss some of the specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered steeling himself for an questioning that never arrived: “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 scarcely any inquiries.”

It was an daunting part to accept, White said. He mentioned often to the immense volume of Springsteen information available, the amount of study he had to acquire, and discussed “the strain I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘worry that set, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of focus 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 undertook, it was through the tunes that he really related to the part. “A lot of my attention was going into the musical side of the film,” he said. “[Scott] asked me to sing and play the guitar, and I said, ‘I can’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was adamant. White promptly recorded his own versions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the vocal chamber, singing Nebraska, and gaining assurance … feeling close to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re studying a great script, your job is very easy,” he said. “And when you’re examining Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. It’s all right there.”

Springsteen also gave White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the most similar he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the finest guitar you can start with,” White says. He began guitar lessons, via Zoom, with professional musician JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so eager to learn guitar with you,” White remembered stating on their first meeting. “We lack the time to learn the guitar,” Simo answered. “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 reasoned 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 accept greater hazards, 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 standard musical biopic, but more of a individual-centered narrative with music.”

As the project moved forward, it maybe became odder. Springsteen came to the filming location often, apologising to White each time he arrived. “It’s gotta be really strange 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 shakes his head and expresses denial.

Springsteen had few doubts about White’s casting; he was aware that the actor was ready to depict the most thoughtful 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 cliche, but he’s a stage legend.”

When he first saw White playing him, he was struck by the actor’s method. “His performance was entirely from the inner self outward, not just selecting traits and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a non-imitative 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 differ so greatly from his own. “You have to find the part of them that is part of you.”

More disturbing was the way the film pushed him to return to difficult periods in his own life. The rebuilding 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 explained how often he returned to 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 – depicting his volatile early years, when he endured unrecognized mental health issues and had a drinking problem, and the fragility and tenderness of his later years.

Springsteen told of watching an early showing in the presence of his sister, who held 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, maybe, of the sensation Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an utopian space for three hours,” he told the select group before him last night. “It’s not a imaginary place. It’s a very plausible world. It has all the wonderful and terrible parts of life … But ideally there’s an element of uplift that my audience brings home. And with luck it lingers in their minds for as long as they need it.”