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Presented as a conversation with Jeremy Allen White, and hinting at “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen arrived on the intimate platform at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the music icon 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 making of this album that forms the core for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which sees White as Springsteen at a pivotal point in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s exchange, steered by Edith Bowman, revolved around the complex method of transforming into the star, and the inescapable oddity of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – consistently, a image of reptilian poise – mentioned first sighting White during a sound check at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was readily visible,” he recalled. “I just beckoned him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already thoroughly versed in Springsteen’s music, had watched hours of concert videos, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a concert act, and to talk over some of the specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen recalled 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 very few questions.”

It was an daunting part to undertake, White said. He referred repeatedly to the immense volume of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of learning he had to take on, and discussed “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘nervousness that set, maybe, into focus.’”

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

For all the research he undertook, it was through the music itself that he really related to the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] asked me to sing and play the guitar, and I said, ‘I am not skilled in those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was adamant. White accordingly recorded his own renditions 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 reading a great script, your job is quite simple,” he said. “And when you’re examining Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. It’s all right there.”

Springsteen also sent White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the most similar he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the nicest guitar you can practice with,” White says. He began guitar lessons, via Zoom, with session player JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so thrilled to learn guitar with you,” White recalled saying on their first meeting. “We lack the 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 initially simpler. “I thought 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 personality-focused story with music.”

As the project moved forward, it perhaps became stranger. Springsteen appeared on location often, apologising to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s must be really weird with the guy’s foolish self 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 attractive?’” In the seat beside him, White shakes his head and shakes his head.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s casting; he understood that the actor was equipped 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 rock star.”

When he first saw White portraying him, he was affected by the actor’s method. “His performance was completely from the inner self outward, not just choosing characteristics and applying them externally,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but in some way it greatly relates to my story and myself.” He saw it as something similar to his own way to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives differ so greatly 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 return to difficult periods in his own life. The reconstruction of his grandparents’ home in Freehold, New Jersey – a house he once described as “the greatest and saddest sanctuary I’ve ever known” was uncanny; Springsteen recounted how often he saw the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was truly wondrous, and extremely moving.”

Similarly, it was “a very powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – depicting his volatile early years, when he endured undiagnosed mental health issues and consumed alcohol excessively, and the vulnerability and sweetness of his later years.

Springsteen told of watching an early screening in the company of his sister, who grasped 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 marvelous that we have that?”

There was an echo, perhaps, of the sensation Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You build an utopian space for three hours,” he informed the select group before him last night. “It’s not a fantasy world. It’s a very plausible 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 hopefully it stays with them for as long as they need it.”