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Billed as a discussion with Jeremy Allen White, and hinting at “a special guest”, there was scarcely any astonishment when Bruce Springsteen appeared on the compact set at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the music icon walked on separately, but to the same clip of opening tune: the opening lines 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 features 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, focused on the complex method of embodying Springsteen, and the unavoidable peculiarity of art meeting life.

Springsteen – consistently, a portrait of reptilian poise – spoke of first spotting White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was readily visible,” he remembered. “I just beckoned him to the stage and we greeted each other.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had watched hours of concert footage, and consumed numerous interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an opportunity for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a concert act, and to discuss some of the details of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen recalled 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 prepared, he really asked very few questions.”

It was an challenging character to take on, White said. He spoke frequently to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information available, the amount of preparation he had to acquire, and spoke of “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘anxiety 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 study he undertook, it was through the music itself that he really related to the part. “A lot of my energy was going into the audio dimension of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected me to sing and play the guitar, and I said, ‘I am not skilled in those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was firm. White promptly recorded his own renditions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the recording space, singing Nebraska, and finding some confidence … feeling close to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re going through a great script, your job is straightforward,” 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 commenced guitar lessons, via Zoom, with professional musician JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so thrilled to learn guitar with you,” White remembered stating 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 originally less complicated. “I figured 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 accept greater hazards, in your work and in your life in general.” It aided that Cooper was “a true blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be drawn to,” he said. “Not your standard musical biopic, but more of a individual-centered narrative with music.”

As the project gathered pace, it possibly became stranger. Springsteen visited the set often, apologising to White each time he showed up. “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 mentioned this previously, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that attractive?’” In the seat beside him, White gestures in disagreement and expresses denial.

Springsteen had few doubts about White’s choice; he understood that the actor was ready to depict the most reflective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera captured his inner world,” 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 acting as him, he was affected by the actor’s technique. “His performance was entirely 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 deeply corresponds to my story and myself.” He saw it as something similar to his own way to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives are very different from his own. “You have to locate the part of them that is part of you.”

More disturbing was the way the film pushed 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 greatest and saddest sanctuary I’ve ever known” was eerie; Springsteen recounted how often he visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was quite a miracle, and very beautiful.”

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

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

There was an reflection, possibly, of the emotion Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an ideal world for three hours,” he told the select group before him last night. “It’s not a imaginary place. It’s a very believable world. It has all the wonderful and terrible parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of transcendence that my audience carries away. And ideally it remains with them for as long as they need it.”