🔗 Share this article

Presented as a discussion with Jeremy Allen White, and hinting at “a special guest”, there was scarcely any astonishment when Bruce Springsteen showed up on the compact set at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the music icon walked on separately, but to the identical excerpt of opening tune: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, ultimately, the making of this LP that forms the core for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which features White as Springsteen at a pivotal point in the singer’s personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s exchange, guided by Edith Bowman, focused on the complex method of becoming Bruce, and the unavoidable peculiarity of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – the whole time, a image of cool composure – recalled first spotting White during a sound check at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was dressed in white attire, so he was simple to notice,” he remembered. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we greeted each other.” White was already deeply immersed in Springsteen’s music, had studied countless recordings of concert videos, and perused many interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an opportunity for a greater understanding of Springsteen as a live performer, and to talk over some of the details of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen reflected preparing 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 well-read, he really asked hardly any queries.”

It was an daunting part to accept, White said. He referred repeatedly to the tremendous amount 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 ‘worry 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 research he undertook, it was through the music itself that he really related to the part. “A lot of my energy was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] asked me to vocalize and handle the guitar, and I said, ‘I am not skilled in those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was firm. White promptly recorded his own interpretations of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the recording space, singing Nebraska, and finding some confidence … relating strongly to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re going through a great script, your job is very easy,” 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 most similar he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the nicest guitar you can learn on,” White says. He began guitar lessons, via Zoom, with professional musician JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so eager to learn guitar with you,” White noted expressing 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 less complicated. “I reasoned 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 genuine blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be drawn to,” he said. “Not your conventional musical biopic, but more of a character-driven drama with music.”

As the project moved forward, it maybe became odder. Springsteen visited the set often, apologising to White each time he arrived. “It’s must be really odd with the guy’s foolish self standing there,” he said. But he liked 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 expresses denial.

Springsteen had few doubts about White’s casting; he was aware that the actor was prepared to depict the most reflective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera followed his internal life,” 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 acting as him, he was affected by the actor’s method. “His performance was totally from the inner self outward, not just choosing characteristics and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but somehow it strongly connects to my story and myself.” He considered it something like his own method to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives are very different from his own. “You have to discover the part of them that is part of you.”

More disconcerting was the way the film forced 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 greatest and saddest 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 remarkable, and extremely moving.”

Similarly, it was “a very impactful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – portraying his volatile early years, when he experienced unidentified mental health issues and consumed alcohol excessively, and the vulnerability and kindness of his later years.

Springsteen recounted watching an early viewing in the presence of his sister, who clutched his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she remembered everything”. At the end, she faced him and said: “Isn’t it amazing that we have that?”

There was an parallel, perhaps, of the emotion Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You build an perfect realm for three hours,” he addressed the select group before him last night. “It’s not a imaginary place. It’s a very plausible world. It has all the joyful and painful parts of life … But ideally there’s an element of uplift that my audience brings home. And ideally it remains with them for as long as they need it.”