🔗 Share this article

Marketed as a conversation with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen arrived on the intimate platform at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the music icon entered separately, but to the identical excerpt of entrance music: the initial lyrics of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, after all, the making of this record that serves as the centerpiece for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which sees White as Springsteen at a decisive juncture in the singer’s personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s exchange, steered by Edith Bowman, revolved around the detailed approach of embodying Springsteen, and the inescapable oddity of art meeting life.

Springsteen – the whole time, a picture of cool composure – recalled first catching a glimpse of White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was simple to notice,” he remembered. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we greeted each other.” White was already deeply immersed in Springsteen’s music, had watched hours of concert videos, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a greater understanding of Springsteen as a live performer, and to talk over some of the specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered 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 challenging character to accept, White said. He referred repeatedly to the sheer weight of Springsteen information available, the amount of preparation he had to absorb, and mentioned “the strain I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘anxiety that solidified, 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 research he pursued, it was through the music itself that he really related to the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the audio dimension of the film,” he said. “[Scott] asked me to sing and play the guitar, and I said, ‘I don’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 vocal chamber, singing Nebraska, and gaining assurance … connecting deeply 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 absorbing Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. It’s all 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 best guitar you can practice with,” White says. He started guitar lessons, via Zoom, with professional musician 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 sentiments about the film were at first more straightforward. “I reasoned 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 benefited that Cooper was “a genuine 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 personality-focused story with music.”

As the project progressed, it possibly became stranger. Springsteen came to the filming location often, saying sorry to White each time he arrived. “It’s has to be really weird 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 handsome?’” In the seat beside him, White shakes his head and signals dissent.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s casting; 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 followed his inner world,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a common saying, but he’s a stage legend.”

When he first saw White playing him, he was impressed by the actor’s technique. “His performance was entirely from the core personality, not just picking elements and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but nevertheless it greatly relates to my story and myself.” He considered it something similar to his own approach to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives vary significantly 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 return to challenging times in his own life. The rebuilding 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 explained how often he returned to the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was quite a miracle, and extremely moving.”

Similarly, it was “a very impactful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – depicting his volatile early years, when he suffered unidentified mental health issues and drank heavily, and the vulnerability and tenderness of his later years.

Springsteen shared watching an early screening in the attendance of his sister, who grasped his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she retained every memory”. At the end, she faced him and said: “Isn’t it amazing that we have that?”

There was an echo, perhaps, of the feeling Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an perfect realm for three hours,” he addressed the select group before him last night. “It’s not a fictional universe. It’s a very plausible world. It has all the wonderful and terrible parts of life … But hopefully there’s an element of transcendence that my audience carries away. And ideally it stays with them for as long as they need it.”