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Marketed as a conversation with Jeremy Allen White, and hinting at “a special guest”, there was scarcely any astonishment when Bruce Springsteen showed up on the compact set at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the music icon walked on separately, but to the matching segment of introductory track: the starting verses of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, after all, the creation of this record that serves as the centerpiece for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which features White as Springsteen at a critical moment in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s conversation, guided by Edith Bowman, focused on the intricate process of embodying Springsteen, and the inescapable oddity of art meeting life.

Springsteen – the whole time, a picture of cool composure – mentioned first spotting White during a sound check at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was simple to notice,” he recalled. “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 footage, and perused many interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an opportunity for a enhanced comprehension of Springsteen as a onstage artist, and to discuss some of the specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen reflected 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 prepared, he really asked hardly any queries.”

It was an challenging character to take on, White said. He referred repeatedly to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of study he had to acquire, and mentioned “the stress I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘nervousness that solidified, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of focus 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 pursued, it was through the songs that he really related to the part. “A lot of my attention was going into the musical side of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected me to perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I don’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was adamant. White accordingly recorded his own versions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the vocal chamber, singing Nebraska, and gaining assurance … relating strongly to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re going through a great script, your job is very easy,” 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 closest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the finest guitar you can practice with,” White says. He began guitar lessons, via Zoom, with touring guitarist JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so thrilled to learn guitar with you,” White noted expressing 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 feelings 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 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 drawn to,” he said. “Not your typical musical biopic, but more of a personality-focused story with music.”

As the project gathered pace, it possibly became odder. Springsteen appeared on location often, expressing regret to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s must be really strange with the guy’s foolish self standing there,” he said. But he appreciated what he saw: “I’ve said this before, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that good-looking?’” In the seat beside him, White wags his finger and expresses denial.

Springsteen had few doubts about White’s choice; he was aware that the actor was equipped to depict the most introspective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera followed his inner world,” 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 acting as him, he was struck by the actor’s method. “His performance was entirely from the inner self outward, not just picking elements and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but somehow it greatly relates to my story and myself.” He considered it something akin to his own method to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives vary significantly from his own. “You have to locate the part of them that is part of you.”

More unsettling was the way the film compelled him to return to challenging times in his own life. The recreation 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 described how often he visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was truly wondrous, and very beautiful.”

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

Springsteen shared watching an early viewing in the attendance of his sister, who clutched 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 parallel, maybe, of the sensation Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You build an ideal world for three hours,” he told the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a imaginary place. It’s a very plausible world. It has all the joyful and painful parts of life … But ideally there’s an element of transcendence that my audience takes with them. And hopefully it remains with them for as long as they need it.”