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Marketed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and hinting at “a special guest”, there was hardly any shock when Bruce Springsteen showed up on the small stage at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the rock star came out separately, but to the same clip of introductory track: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, after all, the production of this album that forms the core 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 exchange, steered by Edith Bowman, focused on the complex method of transforming into the star, and the inescapable oddity of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – throughout, a portrait of cool composure – mentioned first spotting White during a sound check at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was dressed in white attire, so he was easy to spot,” he remembered. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we greeted each other.” White was already thoroughly versed in Springsteen’s music, had watched hours of concert material, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a greater understanding of Springsteen as a concert act, and to explore some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen reflected preparing 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 scarcely any inquiries.”

It was an challenging character to undertake, White said. He spoke frequently to the sheer weight of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of preparation he had to take on, and mentioned “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 research he undertook, it was through the music itself that he really related to the part. “A lot of my attention was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected me to perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I am not skilled in those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was firm. White promptly recorded his own interpretations of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the booth, singing Nebraska, and building self-belief … feeling close 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 reading Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. All the elements are right there.”

Springsteen also presented White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the nearest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the nicest guitar you can learn on,” White says. He started guitar lessons, via Zoom, with touring guitarist JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so excited 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 sentiments about the film were at first more straightforward. “I reasoned 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 helped that Cooper was “a true blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be intrigued by,” he said. “Not your typical musical biopic, but more of a individual-centered narrative with music.”

As the project gathered pace, it maybe became stranger. Springsteen appeared on location often, saying sorry to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s has to be really strange 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 handsome?’” In the seat beside him, White gestures in disagreement and signals dissent.

Springsteen had few doubts about White’s choice; he understood that the actor was ready to portray the most thoughtful time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera tracked his personal thoughts,” 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 struck by the actor’s technique. “His performance was totally from the inner self outward, not just choosing characteristics and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but somehow it greatly relates to my story and myself.” He saw it as something akin to his own approach 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 unsettling was the way the film compelled him to reexamine challenging times 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 strange; Springsteen explained how often he saw the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was remarkable, and extremely moving.”

Similarly, it was “a very impactful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – depicting his turbulent early years, when he suffered unidentified mental health issues and consumed alcohol excessively, and the fragility and sweetness of his later years.

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

There was an echo, maybe, 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 select group before him last night. “It’s not a fictional universe. It’s a very believable world. It has all the joyful and painful parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of transcendence that my audience takes with them. And ideally it stays with them for as long as they need it.”