🔗 Share this article

Marketed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was hardly any shock when Bruce Springsteen showed up on the intimate platform at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the rock star walked on separately, but to the matching segment of introductory track: the initial lyrics of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, after all, the making of this album that provides the focus for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which features White as Springsteen at a critical moment in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s exchange, guided by Edith Bowman, revolved around the complex method of transforming into the star, and the inescapable oddity of art meeting life.

Springsteen – the whole time, a image of serene calm – recalled first sighting White during a rehearsal at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was simple to notice,” he recalled. “I just beckoned him to the stage and we greeted each other.” White was already deeply immersed in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert videos, and perused many interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a greater understanding of Springsteen as a concert act, and to explore some of the specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen recalled steeling himself for an inquiry that failed to materialize: “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 scarcely any inquiries.”

It was an intimidating role to accept, White said. He referred repeatedly to the immense volume of Springsteen information out there, the amount of study 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 focus was going into the music aspect of the film” … Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere.

For all the research he undertook, it was through the music itself that he really bonded with the part. “A lot of my attention was going into the musical component 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 firm. White accordingly recorded his own interpretations 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 reading a great script, your job is quite simple,” he said. “And when you’re absorbing Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. Everything’s right there.”

Springsteen also sent 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 started guitar lessons, via Zoom, with touring guitarist JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so thrilled to learn guitar with you,” White remembered stating 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 thoughts about the film were initially simpler. “I figured 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 take more risks, 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 conventional musical biopic, but more of a individual-centered narrative with music.”

As the project progressed, it perhaps became odder. Springsteen came to the filming location often, saying sorry to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s gotta be really strange with the guy’s foolish self 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 attractive?’” In the seat beside him, White shakes his head and signals dissent.

Springsteen had few doubts about White’s choice; he was aware that the actor was prepared to represent the most introspective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera tracked 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 totally 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 greatly relates to my story and myself.” He viewed it as something akin to his own way to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives are very different from his own. “You have to locate the part of them that is part of you.”

More unsettling was the way the film pushed him to reexamine 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 saw the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was truly wondrous, and extremely moving.”

Similarly, it was “a very impactful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – portraying his turbulent early years, when he endured undiagnosed mental health issues and had a drinking problem, and the fragility and sweetness of his later years.

Springsteen told of watching an early showing in the attendance 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 wonderful that we have that?”

There was an reflection, maybe, of the sensation Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an ideal world for three hours,” he addressed the small crowd before him last night. “It’s not a imaginary place. It’s a very credible world. It has all the joyful and painful parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of elevation that my audience carries away. And ideally it lingers in their minds for as long as they need it.”