🔗 Share this article

Presented as a conversation with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was scarcely any astonishment when Bruce Springsteen appeared on the intimate platform at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the rock star entered separately, but to the matching segment of opening tune: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, in the end, the making of this record that provides the focus for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which sees White as Springsteen at a critical moment in the singer’s personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s exchange, guided by Edith Bowman, focused on the detailed approach of transforming into the star, and the inescapable oddity of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – consistently, a portrait of cool composure – recalled first catching a glimpse of White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was wearing all white, so he was simple to notice,” he remembered. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we exchanged hellos.” White was already deeply immersed in Springsteen’s music, had studied countless recordings of concert footage, and consumed numerous interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an opportunity for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a live performer, and to explore some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen recalled steeling himself for an interrogation 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 challenging character to undertake, White said. He mentioned often to the immense volume of Springsteen information available, the amount of learning he had to absorb, and spoke of “the strain I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘anxiety that set, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of energy was going into the musical component 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 songs that he really related to the part. “A lot of my attention was going into the musical side of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected me to vocalize and handle the guitar, and I said, ‘I am not skilled in those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was insistent. White promptly recorded his own renditions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the recording space, singing Nebraska, and gaining assurance … feeling close to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re studying a great script, your job is very easy,” he said. “And when you’re absorbing Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. All the elements are right there.”

Springsteen also sent White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the nearest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the finest guitar you can start with,” White says. He began 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 are pressed for time to learn the guitar,” Simo answered. “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 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 accept greater hazards, in your work and in your life in general.” It aided that Cooper was “a true 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 gathered pace, it perhaps became stranger. Springsteen appeared on location often, apologising to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s gotta be really strange with the guy’s stupid ass standing there,” he said. But he enjoyed 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 shakes his head.

Springsteen had few doubts about White’s selection; he was aware that the actor was ready to depict the most reflective 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 well-known phrase, but he’s a music icon.”

When he first saw White portraying him, he was impressed by the actor’s approach. “His performance was totally from the inner self outward, not just selecting traits and applying them externally,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but nevertheless it deeply corresponds to my story and myself.” He viewed it as something similar to his own approach to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives are very different from his own. “You have to find the part of them that is part of you.”

More disconcerting was the way the film pushed him to revisit challenging times 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 described how often he visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was remarkable, and quite wonderful.”

Similarly, it was “a very powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – depicting his volatile early years, when he experienced unrecognized mental health issues and had a drinking problem, and the fragility and tenderness of his later years.

Springsteen recounted watching an early viewing in the presence 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, 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 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 ideally there’s an element of transcendence that my audience carries away. And ideally it remains with them for as long as they need it.”