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Billed as a dialogue 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 performer and the rock star walked on separately, but to the matching segment of entrance music: the initial lyrics of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, ultimately, the making of this LP that provides the focus for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which sees White as Springsteen at a decisive juncture in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s conversation, steered by Edith Bowman, focused on the complex method of becoming Bruce, and the unavoidable peculiarity of art meeting life.

Springsteen – the whole time, a image of reptilian poise – mentioned first spotting White during a rehearsal at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was simple to notice,” he recalled. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already thoroughly versed in Springsteen’s music, had studied countless recordings of concert material, and perused many interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an opportunity for a enhanced comprehension of Springsteen as a onstage artist, and to talk over some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen recalled steeling himself for an interrogation 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 hardly any queries.”

It was an intimidating role to take on, White said. He spoke frequently to the sheer weight of Springsteen information available, the amount of preparation he had to acquire, and discussed “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘nervousness 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 study he pursued, it was through the music itself that he really connected to the part. “A lot of my energy was going into the musical side of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected me to perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I can’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was adamant. White promptly 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 studying a great script, your job is very easy,” he said. “And when you’re absorbing Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. Everything’s right there.”

Springsteen also sent White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the nearest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the best guitar you can start with,” White says. He commenced guitar lessons, via Zoom, with session player JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so eager 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 originally less complicated. “I figured 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 take more risks, in your work and in your life in general.” It helped that Cooper was “a real blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be intrigued by,” he said. “Not your standard musical biopic, but more of a individual-centered narrative with music.”

As the project moved forward, it possibly became odder. Springsteen visited the set often, apologising to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s has to be really strange with the guy’s stupid ass standing there,” he said. But he appreciated what he saw: “I’ve stated this earlier, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that attractive?’” In the seat beside him, White shakes his head and expresses denial.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s selection; he understood 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 internal life,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a well-known phrase, but he’s a stage legend.”

When he first saw White portraying him, he was impressed by the actor’s approach. “His performance was completely from the core personality, not just picking elements and applying them externally,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but somehow it greatly relates to my story and myself.” He viewed it as something like his own way to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives are very different from his own. “You have to locate the part of them that is part of you.”

More disturbing 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 best and most sorrowful sanctuary I’ve ever known” was uncanny; 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 undiagnosed mental health issues and drank heavily, and the vulnerability and kindness of his later years.

Springsteen recounted watching an early screening in the attendance of his sister, who clutched his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she remembered everything”. At the end, she faced him and said: “Isn’t it marvelous that we have that?”

There was an reflection, possibly, of the feeling Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You build an utopian space for three hours,” he informed the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a imaginary place. It’s a very believable world. It has all the beautiful and awful parts of life … But hopefully there’s an element of uplift that my audience brings home. And with luck it remains with them for as long as they need it.”