🔗 Share this article

Presented as a conversation with Jeremy Allen White, and offering “a special guest”, there was scarcely any astonishment when Bruce Springsteen appeared on the small stage at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the music icon walked on separately, but to the identical excerpt of entrance music: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, in the end, the production of this LP that forms the core for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which sees White as Springsteen at a decisive juncture in the singer’s personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s conversation, moderated by Edith Bowman, revolved around the intricate process of transforming into the star, and the unavoidable peculiarity of art meeting life.

Springsteen – the whole time, a image of cool composure – spoke of 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 readily visible,” he recalled. “I just beckoned him to the stage and we exchanged hellos.” 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 opportunity for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a concert act, and to explore some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen reflected steeling himself for an questioning that never arrived: “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 accept, White said. He mentioned often to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information out there, the amount of learning he had to acquire, and discussed “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘nervousness that solidified, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of focus 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 connected to the part. “A lot of my energy was going into the audio dimension 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 versions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the vocal chamber, singing Nebraska, and finding some confidence … relating strongly to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re reading a great script, your job is straightforward,” he said. “And when you’re examining Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. All the elements are right there.”

Springsteen also presented White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the nearest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the best guitar you can learn on,” 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 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 feelings about the film were at first more straightforward. “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 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 stranger. Springsteen visited the set often, apologising to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s gotta be really weird with the guy’s foolish self standing there,” he said. But he enjoyed what he saw: “I’ve mentioned this previously, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that good-looking?’” In the seat beside him, White gestures in disagreement and expresses denial.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation 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 captured his inner world,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a common saying, but he’s a stage legend.”

When he first saw White playing him, he was struck by the actor’s method. “His performance was entirely from the inner self outward, not just picking elements and adopting them superficially,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but in some way it greatly relates to my story and myself.” He saw it as something akin to his own method to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives differ so greatly from his own. “You have to locate the part of them that is part of you.”

More unsettling was the way the film compelled 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 strange; Springsteen explained how often he saw 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 emotional thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – capturing his volatile early years, when he experienced undiagnosed mental health issues and drank heavily, and the sensitivity and tenderness of his later years.

Springsteen recounted watching an early screening in the presence of his sister, who held his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she retained every memory”. At the end, she looked at him and said: “Isn’t it marvelous that we have that?”

There was an echo, maybe, of the emotion Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an ideal world for three hours,” he addressed the select group before him last night. “It’s not a fantasy world. It’s a very credible world. It has all the beautiful and awful parts of life … But ideally there’s an element of uplift that my audience takes with them. And ideally it remains with them for as long as they need it.”