🔗 Share this article

Presented as a conversation with Jeremy Allen White, and hinting at “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen showed up on the intimate platform at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the music icon entered separately, but to the matching segment of introductory track: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, ultimately, the creation of this album that forms the core 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 talk, moderated by Edith Bowman, focused on the intricate process of transforming into the star, and the inevitable strangeness of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – throughout, a image of reptilian poise – recalled first sighting 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 remembered. “I just beckoned him to the stage and we greeted each other.” White was already thoroughly versed in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert footage, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a concert act, and to talk over some of the specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen recalled steeling himself for an interrogation 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 hardly any queries.”

It was an challenging character to undertake, White said. He referred repeatedly to the sheer weight of Springsteen information available, the amount of learning he had to acquire, and discussed “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘anxiety that hardened, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of effort 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 undertook, it was through the songs that he really connected to the part. “A lot of my energy was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] asked me to sing and play the guitar, and I said, ‘I can’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was firm. White duly recorded his own interpretations of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the vocal chamber, singing Nebraska, and finding some confidence … connecting deeply 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. 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 nicest 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 recalled saying on their first meeting. “We don’t have 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 less complicated. “I thought I’m 76 years old, I have few worries 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 interested in,” he said. “Not your conventional musical biopic, but more of a individual-centered narrative with music.”

As the project progressed, it maybe became more unusual. Springsteen visited the set often, apologising to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s must be really strange with the guy’s stupid ass standing there,” he said. But he enjoyed what he saw: “I’ve mentioned this previously, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that good-looking?’” In the seat beside him, White wags his finger and shakes his head.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s casting; he understood that the actor was equipped to represent the most thoughtful time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera tracked his inner world,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a well-known phrase, but he’s a stage legend.”

When he first saw White playing him, he was affected by the actor’s approach. “His performance was entirely from the inner self outward, not just choosing characteristics and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a non-imitative performance, but somehow it strongly connects to my story and myself.” He viewed it as something like his own approach to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives differ so greatly from his own. “You have to locate the part of them that is part of you.”

More disconcerting was the way the film pushed him to revisit difficult periods in his own life. The recreation 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 strange; 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 quite wonderful.”

Similarly, it was “a very emotional thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – capturing his turbulent early years, when he experienced unrecognized mental health issues and drank heavily, and the fragility and kindness of his later years.

Springsteen recounted watching an early screening in the company of his sister, who held 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 reflection, possibly, of the emotion Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an perfect realm for three hours,” he told the small crowd 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 hopefully there’s an element of transcendence that my audience takes with them. And ideally it remains with them for as long as they need it.”