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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 compact set at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the music icon came out separately, but to the same clip 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 provides the focus for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which casts White as Springsteen at a pivotal point in the singer’s personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s exchange, moderated by Edith Bowman, revolved around the intricate process of becoming Bruce, and the unavoidable peculiarity of art meeting life.

Springsteen – consistently, a portrait of serene calm – mentioned first spotting White during a sound check at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was easy to spot,” he noted. “I just beckoned him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already deeply immersed in Springsteen’s music, had studied countless recordings of concert material, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an opportunity for a enhanced comprehension of Springsteen as a live performer, and to explore some of the details of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered bracing 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 prepared, he really asked hardly any queries.”

It was an daunting part to take on, White said. He spoke frequently to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information available, the amount of study he had to absorb, and spoke of “the stress I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘anxiety that set, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of energy was going into the music aspect of the film” … Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere.

For all the learning he pursued, it was through the songs that he really connected to the part. “A lot of my attention was going into the musical side of the film,” he said. “[Scott] wanted me to perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I don’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was adamant. White promptly recorded his own versions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the booth, singing Nebraska, and finding some confidence … feeling close to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re reading a great script, your job is very easy,” he said. “And when you’re examining Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. All the elements are right there.”

Springsteen also sent White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the closest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the finest guitar you can learn on,” White says. He began guitar lessons, via Zoom, with professional musician JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so thrilled to learn guitar with you,” White recalled saying on their first meeting. “We are pressed for 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 originally 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 accept greater hazards, 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 interested in,” he said. “Not your standard musical biopic, but more of a personality-focused story with music.”

As the project progressed, it perhaps became odder. Springsteen appeared on location often, apologising to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s must be really strange with the guy’s silly presence standing there,” he said. But he liked what he saw: “I’ve said this before, 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 choice; he was aware that the actor was prepared to portray the most reflective 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 common saying, but he’s a music icon.”

When he first saw White acting as him, he was affected by the actor’s technique. “His performance was completely from the inner self outward, not just choosing characteristics and applying them externally,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but nevertheless it deeply corresponds to my story and myself.” He saw it as something akin to his own method to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives vary significantly from his own. “You have to discover the part of them that is part of you.”

More disconcerting was the way the film forced him to revisit challenging times in his own life. The reconstruction of his grandparents’ home in Freehold, New Jersey – a house he once described as “the finest and most tragic sanctuary I’ve ever known” was eerie; Springsteen described how often he returned to the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was remarkable, and quite wonderful.”

Similarly, it was “a very emotional thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – capturing his unpredictable early years, when he endured unidentified mental health issues and had a drinking problem, and the vulnerability and sweetness of his later years.

Springsteen shared watching an early viewing in the company of his sister, who clutched 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 wonderful that we have that?”

There was an echo, perhaps, of the sensation Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an utopian space for three hours,” he addressed the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a fictional universe. 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 carries away. And with luck it lingers in their minds for as long as they need it.”