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Billed as a discussion with Jeremy Allen White, and hinting at “a special guest”, there was scarcely any astonishment when Bruce Springsteen arrived 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 introductory track: the starting verses of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, in the end, the production of this album that provides the focus for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which sees White as Springsteen at a critical moment in the singer’s personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s exchange, moderated by Edith Bowman, revolved around the detailed approach of becoming Bruce, and the inescapable oddity of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – throughout, a image of serene calm – recalled first spotting White during a rehearsal at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was dressed in white attire, so he was simple to notice,” he remembered. “I just kind of waved him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already thoroughly versed in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert footage, and perused many interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a greater understanding of Springsteen as a concert act, and to talk over some of the details of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered bracing 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 prepared, he really asked scarcely any inquiries.”

It was an intimidating role to accept, White said. He referred repeatedly to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information out there, the amount of study he had to take on, and discussed “the pressure 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 learning 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 sing and play the guitar, and I said, ‘I don’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was insistent. White promptly recorded his own renditions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the vocal chamber, singing Nebraska, and building self-belief … connecting deeply to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re reading a great script, your job is very easy,” he said. “And when you’re reading Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. All the elements are right there.”

Springsteen also presented White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the closest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the nicest guitar you can learn on,” White says. He commenced guitar lessons, via Zoom, with touring guitarist JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so eager to learn guitar with you,” White noted expressing on their first meeting. “We are pressed for time to learn the guitar,” Simo replied. “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 at first simpler. “I thought 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 take more risks, in your work and in your life in general.” It helped that Cooper was “a genuine blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be drawn to,” he said. “Not your typical musical biopic, but more of a personality-focused story with music.”

As the project gathered pace, it possibly became stranger. Springsteen visited the set often, apologising to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s has to be really weird with the guy’s foolish self standing there,” he said. But he appreciated what he saw: “I’ve said this before, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that good-looking?’” In the seat beside him, White shakes his head and shakes his head.

Springsteen had few doubts about White’s selection; he was aware that the actor was ready to represent the most thoughtful 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 well-known phrase, but he’s a music icon.”

When he first saw White playing him, he was impressed by the actor’s approach. “His performance was completely from the inner self outward, not just picking elements and adopting them superficially,” 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 like his own approach to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives vary significantly from his own. “You have to discover the part of them that is part of you.”

More disconcerting was the way the film compelled him to revisit 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 eerie; 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 powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – capturing his unpredictable early years, when he suffered undiagnosed mental health issues and consumed alcohol excessively, and the fragility and tenderness of his later years.

Springsteen shared watching an early screening in the company 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 wonderful that we have that?”

There was an reflection, perhaps, 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 small crowd before him last night. “It’s not a fantasy world. It’s a very credible world. It has all the beautiful and awful parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of transcendence that my audience carries away. And ideally it remains with them for as long as they need it.”