🔗 Share this article

Marketed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and hinting at “a special guest”, there was hardly any shock when Bruce Springsteen arrived on the small stage at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the music icon entered separately, but to the identical excerpt of introductory track: the initial lyrics of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, ultimately, the creation of this album that serves as the centerpiece for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which features White as Springsteen at a pivotal point in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s conversation, steered by Edith Bowman, focused on the intricate process of transforming into the star, and the inevitable strangeness of art meeting life.

Springsteen – consistently, a portrait of reptilian poise – spoke of first sighting White during a rehearsal at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was easy to spot,” he remembered. “I just kind of waved him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had studied countless recordings of concert footage, and consumed numerous 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 details of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen reflected steeling himself for an inquiry that did not come: “I thought this guy is really gonna be interested in me …” he said. In the end, however, “Jeremy was so thoroughly briefed, he really asked scarcely any inquiries.”

It was an challenging character to undertake, White said. He referred repeatedly to the immense volume of Springsteen information out there, the amount of study he had to acquire, and discussed “the strain I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘nervousness that set, 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 study he engaged in, it was through the music itself that he really bonded with the part. “A lot of my energy was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] wanted me to sing and play the guitar, and I said, ‘I don’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was firm. White duly recorded his own versions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the recording space, singing Nebraska, and building self-belief … relating strongly to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re going through a great script, your job is quite simple,” 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 most similar he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the best guitar you can learn on,” White says. He began guitar lessons, via Zoom, with touring guitarist JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so excited to learn guitar with you,” White remembered stating on their first meeting. “We are pressed for 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 thoughts about the film were originally simpler. “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 benefited that Cooper was “a genuine blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be intrigued by,” he said. “Not your standard musical biopic, but more of a character-driven drama with music.”

As the project moved forward, it perhaps became more unusual. Springsteen came to the filming location often, saying sorry to White each time he showed up. “It’s has to be really strange with the guy’s silly presence 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 gestures in disagreement and expresses denial.

Springsteen had few doubts about White’s choice; he understood that the actor was equipped to depict the most thoughtful time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera followed his personal thoughts,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a common saying, but he’s a rock star.”

When he first saw White playing him, he was affected by the actor’s method. “His performance was totally from the core personality, not just choosing characteristics and applying them externally,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but somehow it strongly connects to my story and myself.” He saw it as something similar to his own method to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives differ so greatly 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 return to challenging times in his own life. The reconstruction of his grandparents’ home in Freehold, New Jersey – a house he once described as “the best and most sorrowful sanctuary I’ve ever known” was eerie; Springsteen described how often he visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was truly wondrous, and quite wonderful.”

Similarly, it was “a very impactful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – capturing his turbulent early years, when he endured unrecognized mental health issues and consumed alcohol excessively, and the fragility and sweetness of his later years.

Springsteen told of watching an early viewing in the presence of his sister, who clutched 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 echo, maybe, of the emotion Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an ideal world for three hours,” he informed the select group before him last night. “It’s not a fictional universe. It’s a very believable world. It has all the beautiful and awful parts of life … But hopefully there’s an element of transcendence that my audience takes with them. And with luck it remains with them for as long as they need it.”