🔗 Share this article

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 intimate platform at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the music icon came out separately, but to the same clip of introductory track: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, ultimately, the making of this LP that forms the core for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which features White as Springsteen at a decisive juncture in the singer’s personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s talk, steered by Edith Bowman, focused on the intricate process of becoming Bruce, and the unavoidable peculiarity of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – consistently, a portrait of serene calm – spoke of first sighting White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was dressed in white attire, so he was readily visible,” he noted. “I just beckoned him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already thoroughly versed in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert videos, and consumed numerous interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an opportunity for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a onstage artist, and to explore some of the specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen recalled bracing 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 prepared, he really asked hardly any queries.”

It was an daunting part to undertake, White said. He spoke frequently to the sheer weight of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of study he had to acquire, and spoke of “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘nervousness that set, 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 study he undertook, it was through the tunes that he really bonded with the part. “A lot of my energy was going into the audio dimension of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected me to perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I can’t do 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 booth, singing Nebraska, and building self-belief … connecting deeply to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re studying a great script, your job is straightforward,” he said. “And when you’re reading Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. It’s all right there.”

Springsteen also gave 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 session player JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so excited to learn guitar with you,” White noted expressing 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 originally simpler. “I thought 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 benefited that Cooper was “a true 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 progressed, it possibly became stranger. Springsteen appeared on location often, saying sorry to White each time he arrived. “It’s must be really strange with the guy’s foolish self standing there,” he said. But he appreciated what he saw: “I’ve stated this earlier, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that good-looking?’” In the seat beside him, White shakes his head and signals dissent.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s choice; he knew that the actor was prepared to portray the most reflective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera followed his internal life,” 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 portraying him, he was impressed by the actor’s approach. “His performance was completely from the inside out, not just selecting traits and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but somehow it strongly connects to my story and myself.” He saw it as 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 forced him to return to hard phases in his own life. The rebuilding 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 explained how often he returned to the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was truly wondrous, and quite wonderful.”

Similarly, it was “a very powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – portraying his unpredictable early years, when he suffered undiagnosed mental health issues and drank heavily, and the sensitivity and tenderness of his later years.

Springsteen shared watching an early viewing in the attendance of his sister, who held his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she remembered everything”. At the end, she looked at him and said: “Isn’t it amazing that we have that?”

There was an reflection, possibly, of the feeling Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You create an utopian space 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 hopefully it remains with them for as long as they need it.”