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Billed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen appeared on the small stage at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the music icon came out separately, but to the identical excerpt of entrance music: the starting verses of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, after all, the making of this album 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 life and career. Much of the evening’s talk, moderated by Edith Bowman, revolved around the detailed approach of embodying Springsteen, and the inevitable strangeness of art meeting life.

Springsteen – the whole time, a portrait of cool composure – spoke of first catching a glimpse of White during a sound check at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was simple to notice,” he remembered. “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 footage, and perused many interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an occasion for a greater understanding of Springsteen as a live performer, and to talk over some of the specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered steeling himself for an inquiry 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 challenging character to accept, White said. He referred repeatedly to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of learning he had to acquire, and mentioned “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 research he undertook, it was through the songs that he really connected to the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected me to sing and play the guitar, and I said, ‘I can’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was firm. White promptly recorded his own versions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the recording space, singing Nebraska, and gaining assurance … connecting deeply to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re reading a great script, your job is straightforward,” 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 nearest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the finest guitar you can practice with,” White says. He started guitar lessons, via Zoom, with touring guitarist JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so thrilled to learn guitar with you,” White recalled saying on their first meeting. “We don’t have 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 feelings about the film were at first less complicated. “I thought 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 benefited that Cooper was “a real blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be drawn to,” he said. “Not your conventional musical biopic, but more of a individual-centered narrative with music.”

As the project progressed, it perhaps became more unusual. Springsteen appeared on location often, saying sorry to White each time he showed up. “It’s has to be really odd with the guy’s foolish self 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 good-looking?’” In the seat beside him, White wags his finger and expresses denial.

Springsteen had few doubts about White’s choice; he was aware that the actor was equipped to represent the most introspective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera tracked his internal life,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a common saying, but he’s a music icon.”

When he first saw White acting as him, he was impressed by the actor’s approach. “His performance was totally from the inner self outward, not just choosing characteristics 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 considered it 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 disturbing was the way the film forced 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 visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was quite a miracle, and quite wonderful.”

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

Springsteen recounted watching an early viewing 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 looked at him and said: “Isn’t it wonderful that we have that?”

There was an parallel, possibly, of the emotion 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 fictional universe. It’s a very plausible world. It has all the joyful and painful parts of life … But hopefully there’s an element of transcendence that my audience carries away. And ideally it stays with them for as long as they need it.”