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Presented as a discussion with Jeremy Allen White, and hinting at “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen showed up on the small stage 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, ultimately, the making of this album that serves as the centerpiece for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which sees White as Springsteen at a critical moment in the singer’s personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s talk, guided by Edith Bowman, revolved around the complex method of transforming into the star, and the inescapable oddity of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – the whole time, a portrait of serene calm – spoke of first sighting White during a rehearsal at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was readily visible,” he recalled. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we exchanged hellos.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert videos, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an occasion for a greater understanding of Springsteen as a concert act, and to talk over some of the specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen recalled preparing himself for an questioning that did not come: “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 intimidating role to accept, White said. He mentioned often to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information available, the amount of preparation he had to acquire, and spoke of “the strain 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 sonic element of the film” … Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere.

For all the research he engaged in, it was through the songs that he really bonded with the part. “A lot of my attention was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] wanted me to perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I can’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was adamant. White duly recorded his own versions 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 studying a great script, your job is quite simple,” he said. “And when you’re examining Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. Everything’s 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 best guitar you can practice 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 remembered stating on their first meeting. “We lack the 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 thoughts about the film were at first less complicated. “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 embrace more chances, in your work and in your life in general.” It helped that Cooper was “a genuine blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be interested in,” he said. “Not your conventional musical biopic, but more of a personality-focused story with music.”

As the project gathered pace, it possibly became more unusual. Springsteen appeared on location often, apologising to White each time he showed up. “It’s has to be really strange with the guy’s silly presence 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 gestures in disagreement and signals dissent.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s choice; he understood that the actor was equipped to represent the most introspective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera followed his internal life,” 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 playing him, he was affected by the actor’s method. “His performance was completely from the core personality, not just selecting traits and applying them externally,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but in some way it strongly connects to my story and myself.” He considered it 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 disturbing was the way the film compelled him to revisit challenging times 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 described how often he visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was remarkable, and quite wonderful.”

Similarly, it was “a very impactful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – portraying his unpredictable early years, when he endured unrecognized mental health issues and consumed alcohol excessively, and the sensitivity and tenderness of his later years.

Springsteen told of watching an early showing in the company of his sister, who held his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she recalled all details”. At the end, she looked at him and said: “Isn’t it wonderful that we have that?”

There was an parallel, possibly, of the feeling Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You create an ideal world for three hours,” he told the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a fantasy world. It’s a very believable world. It has all the wonderful and terrible parts of life … But ideally there’s an element of elevation that my audience takes with them. And with luck it remains with them for as long as they need it.”