🔗 Share this article

Billed as a conversation with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen showed up on the small stage at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the rock star came out separately, but to the matching segment of introductory track: the initial lyrics of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, ultimately, the production of this album that provides the focus for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which casts White as Springsteen at a pivotal point in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s talk, moderated by Edith Bowman, focused on the detailed approach of embodying Springsteen, and the inevitable strangeness of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – consistently, a picture of serene calm – spoke of first spotting White during a rehearsal at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was readily visible,” he noted. “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 footage, and consumed numerous interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an opportunity for a enhanced comprehension of Springsteen as a live performer, and to discuss some of the specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen recalled preparing 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 intimidating role to undertake, White said. He referred repeatedly to the immense volume 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 ‘nervousness that hardened, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of effort was going into the music aspect 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 musical side of the film,” he said. “[Scott] asked me to vocalize and handle the guitar, and I said, ‘I don’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was insistent. White promptly recorded his own interpretations of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the vocal chamber, singing Nebraska, and building self-belief … feeling close to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re studying a great script, your job is straightforward,” he said. “And when you’re reading 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 nicest 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 replied. “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 at first simpler. “I thought I’m 76 years old, I have few worries 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 real blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be interested in,” he said. “Not your standard musical biopic, but more of a individual-centered narrative with music.”

As the project progressed, it maybe became odder. Springsteen came to the filming 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 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 shakes his head and expresses denial.

Springsteen had few doubts about White’s selection; he knew that the actor was equipped to represent the most thoughtful time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera tracked his inner world,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a well-known phrase, but he’s a stage legend.”

When he first saw White playing him, he was impressed by the actor’s approach. “His performance was totally from the core personality, not just selecting traits 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 similar to his own way 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 unsettling was the way the film forced him to return to challenging times 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 uncanny; Springsteen recounted how often he visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was quite a miracle, and very beautiful.”

Similarly, it was “a very impactful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – capturing his unpredictable 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 showing in the company of his sister, who held 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, maybe, of the sensation Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You create an utopian space for three hours,” he informed the select group before him last night. “It’s not a imaginary place. It’s a very believable world. It has all the wonderful and terrible parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of uplift that my audience carries away. And ideally it remains with them for as long as they need it.”