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Presented as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and hinting at “a special guest”, there was scarcely any astonishment when Bruce Springsteen arrived on the intimate platform at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the rock star walked on separately, but to the identical excerpt of opening tune: the starting verses of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, in the end, the creation of this LP that serves as the centerpiece for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which casts 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 intricate process of transforming into the star, and the inevitable strangeness of art meeting life.

Springsteen – the whole time, a image of reptilian poise – mentioned first spotting White during a sound check at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was wearing all white, so he was easy to spot,” he remembered. “I just casually gestured 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 consumed numerous interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an opportunity for a enhanced comprehension of Springsteen as a onstage artist, and to discuss some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen recalled bracing himself for an inquiry that did not come: “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 daunting part to undertake, White said. He mentioned often to the immense volume of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of preparation he had to acquire, and spoke of “the stress I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘anxiety that set, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of focus was going into the musical component of the film” … Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere.

For all the study 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] asked me to vocalize and handle the guitar, and I said, ‘I am not skilled in those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was firm. 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 gaining assurance … connecting deeply 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 reading Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. It’s all 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 nicest guitar you can learn on,” White says. He began guitar lessons, via Zoom, with professional musician 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 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 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 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 gathered pace, it possibly became odder. Springsteen visited the set often, apologising to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s gotta be really odd with the guy’s stupid ass 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 gestures in disagreement and expresses denial.

Springsteen had few doubts about White’s casting; he knew that the actor was ready to depict the most thoughtful time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera tracked 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 acting as him, he was struck by the actor’s approach. “His performance was entirely from the core personality, not just selecting traits and applying them externally,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but nevertheless it deeply corresponds to my story and myself.” He saw it as something like his own way 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 disconcerting was the way the film forced him to reexamine difficult periods 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 described how often he saw the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was truly wondrous, and quite wonderful.”

Similarly, it was “a very impactful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – capturing his volatile early years, when he experienced undiagnosed mental health issues and had a drinking problem, and the vulnerability and tenderness of his later years.

Springsteen shared watching an early screening 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 looked at him and said: “Isn’t it marvelous that we have that?”

There was an parallel, perhaps, of the emotion Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You create an ideal world for three hours,” he informed the select group before him last night. “It’s not a imaginary place. It’s a very credible 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 remains with them for as long as they need it.”