🔗 Share this article

Marketed as a discussion with Jeremy Allen White, and offering “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen appeared on the intimate platform at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the rock star came out separately, but to the identical excerpt of opening tune: the initial lyrics of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, after all, the making of this album that forms the core for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which sees White as Springsteen at a pivotal point in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s exchange, moderated by Edith Bowman, revolved around the complex method of becoming Bruce, and the unavoidable peculiarity of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – throughout, a image of reptilian poise – recalled first spotting White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was readily visible,” he recalled. “I just beckoned him to the stage and we greeted each other.” 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 occasion for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a concert act, and to discuss some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered steeling himself for an questioning that failed to materialize: “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 daunting part to accept, White said. He spoke frequently to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information available, the amount of preparation he had to acquire, and spoke of “the strain I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘nervousness that hardened, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of focus was going into the sonic element of the film” … Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere.

For all the learning he engaged in, 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 perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I don’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was insistent. White accordingly recorded his own interpretations of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the booth, singing Nebraska, and gaining assurance … connecting deeply 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 examining Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. Everything’s right there.”

Springsteen also gave White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the most similar he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the nicest guitar you can start with,” White says. He began guitar lessons, via Zoom, with session player 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 feelings about the film were originally less complicated. “I reasoned I’m 76 years old, I am not overly concerned 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 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 stranger. Springsteen appeared on location often, expressing regret to White each time he showed up. “It’s has to be really odd 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 attractive?’” In the seat beside him, White wags his finger and signals dissent.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s selection; he understood that the actor was prepared to represent the most reflective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera captured his internal life,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a well-known phrase, but he’s a music icon.”

When he first saw White acting as him, he was struck by the actor’s technique. “His performance was totally from the inside out, not just choosing characteristics and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but nevertheless it deeply corresponds 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 disturbing was the way the film compelled him to return to hard phases in his own life. The reconstruction 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 visited 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 powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – portraying his turbulent early years, when he suffered undiagnosed mental health issues and drank heavily, and the fragility and kindness of his later years.

Springsteen told of watching an early screening in the company of his sister, who grasped 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 parallel, possibly, of the emotion Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an ideal world for three hours,” he told the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a fantasy world. It’s a very believable world. It has all the wonderful and terrible parts of life … But ideally there’s an element of transcendence that my audience takes with them. And with luck it lingers in their minds for as long as they need it.”