🔗 Share this article

Billed as a conversation 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 opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, ultimately, the creation of this record 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 life and career. Much of the evening’s talk, steered by Edith Bowman, focused on the detailed approach of transforming into the star, and the unavoidable peculiarity of art meeting life.

Springsteen – throughout, a image of serene calm – recalled first catching a glimpse of White during a sound check at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was readily visible,” he remembered. “I just beckoned him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had watched hours of concert videos, and perused many interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a greater understanding of Springsteen as a onstage artist, and to explore some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered bracing 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 challenging character to take on, White said. He spoke frequently to the sheer weight of Springsteen information available, the amount of preparation he had to take on, and discussed “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘anxiety that hardened, 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 study he pursued, it was through the tunes that he really connected to the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the musical side of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected 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 interpretations of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the vocal chamber, singing Nebraska, and gaining assurance … connecting deeply to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re studying a great script, your job is quite simple,” he said. “And when you’re examining Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. All the elements are 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 best guitar you can learn on,” White says. He started guitar lessons, via Zoom, with professional musician 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 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 feelings 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 embrace more chances, in your work and in your life in general.” It aided that Cooper was “a genuine blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be intrigued by,” he said. “Not your typical musical biopic, but more of a personality-focused story with music.”

As the project moved forward, it maybe became more unusual. Springsteen visited the set often, expressing regret to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s gotta be really strange with the guy’s silly presence standing there,” he said. But he enjoyed what he saw: “I’ve said this before, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that handsome?’” In the seat beside him, White gestures in disagreement and shakes his head.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s selection; he understood that the actor was prepared to depict the most introspective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera followed his inner world,” 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 acting as him, he was struck by the actor’s approach. “His performance was entirely from the inside out, not just picking elements and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but nevertheless it strongly connects to my story and myself.” He saw it as something akin to his own method to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives vary significantly from his own. “You have to locate the part of them that is part of you.”

More disturbing was the way the film pushed him to reexamine challenging times in his own life. The recreation 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 uncanny; Springsteen explained how often he returned to the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was remarkable, and quite wonderful.”

Similarly, it was “a very emotional thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – portraying his volatile early years, when he experienced undiagnosed mental health issues and had a drinking problem, and the sensitivity and kindness of his later years.

Springsteen shared watching an early screening in the presence 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 reflection, possibly, of the emotion Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You create an ideal world for three hours,” he addressed the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a fantasy world. It’s a very believable world. It has all the joyful and painful parts of life … But ideally there’s an element of transcendence that my audience brings home. And ideally it lingers in their minds for as long as they need it.”