Bruce Almighty: Jeremy Allen White Talks Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere

Imagine you’ve been cast to play a rock star in a biopic.

But it is not just any rock star. 

It is Bruce Springsteen. 

And you will need to not only look like him but learn to play the guitar and sing like him, and there’ll be moments when the real Bruce Springsteen will be watching you do just that.

That was the challenge facing Jeremy Allen White in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (in theatres October 24), which chronicles Springsteen as he faces his inner demons to write and record his 1982 album Nebraska. 

 “I started in a place of real fear to be honest,” says White via Zoom during a recent press conference. 

The 34-year-old actor is joined by writer-director Cooper, co-star Jeremy Strong, who plays Springsteen’s manager and close friend Jon Landau and author Warren Zanes, whose book Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska served as the basis for the film.

 “At the beginning, I was concerning myself with a lot of exterior ideas,” continues White. “I read Warren’s book. I listened to Bruce’s autobiography. I watched footage of Bruce, and I felt like I was burying myself for a while.

“My breakthrough was taking Bruce out of it for a moment to try and allow me to get close to the man during this period between 1981 and 1982. This man who’s a musician who’s come back home after a tour thinking he’s going to find a little bit of peace. Instead, he finds something different. A man in his creative process searching and finding inspiration, and once I started approaching Bruce Springsteen as a man rather than a god, that is when I began to find my footing.” 

The film shows Springsteen returning to New Jersey after the exhausting The River tour. While The River album has been his most successful record to date, Springsteen feels lost as an artist. At age 32, he’s suffering from depression and the realization he must deal with the unresolved trauma of growing up with an emotionally abusive father.

So, he rents a house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, and alone in his bedroom he writes and records songs about despair, isolation, working-class heroes and criminals. 

“This is a film about many things, including a man wrestling with how honest he can be in his work, and the courage to look inward and deal with personal trauma,” says Cooper, whose breakthrough film Crazy Heart (2009) focused on an alcoholic country singer (Jeff Bridges) dealing with his demons and searching for redemption.

“The challenge is how do you dramatize that,” he continues. “So much of the film takes place in [Bruce’s] bedroom or rental house. The silence, facing the four-track recorder, and the courage to look inward. How do you make that entertaining and how do you get inside Bruce’s head?”

It begins with finding consummate actors willing to throw themselves into their roles.

“When you have actors as good as Jeremy and Jeremy, who have the ability to play a range of emotions with a glance and show introspection and pain only the way really great film actors can, it makes everything possible,” says Cooper.

Both White and Strong are performers working at the peak of their powers. White continues to shine as the loving yet temperamental chef Carmy Berzatto in the hit series The Bear, earning two Emmy Awards for his work, while Strong recently wrapped his stellar turn as Succession’s scheming Kendall Roy, which earned him an Emmy Award.

Strong brings his trademark intensity to his portrayal of Landau, who is more than Springsteen's manager: he’s his number-one fan and champion.

“Jon is like a gardener and Bruce is like an exotic flower,” says Strong. “There’s always a sensitivity to the conditions, the environment. Like what does he need right now in order to flourish and grow?” 

Strong believes his onscreen chemistry with White was so natural due to the fact both actors were so committed to their portrayals.

“You look at the pictures of Bruce and Jon in those early days with their arms around each other and the smiles on their faces — you can feel that love, that connection, that bond,” he says. “Did I plan how are we going to do that? No. You don’t even think about there being cameras there. You just enter into something that you inhabit deeply, and the rest comes out of that. It was just there.”

What wasn’t there for White was the ability to play the guitar. The actor admits he’d never picked up the instrument before agreeing to play Springsteen, which meant taking a crash course from guitarist and singer/songwriter JD Simo. Springsteen gave White one of his own guitars to use to learn to play, and after six months of lessons, White perfected five Springsteen songs used in the film.

He also had to perfect Springsteen’s voice and singing style. White performs all the songs on the film, including Springsteen’s most famous rock anthem, “Born in the U.S.A.”

“I did pre-record “Born in the U.S.A.” at the Power Station studio where it was originally recorded,” says White.

“I remember that day very clearly. It was about a week prior to beginning the filming process. You can’t quite sing that song, you kind of gotta shout it, and I remember it laid me out. I spent about two hours singing that song with our wonderful music producer Dave Cobb, and I was on my back when we finished it. I lost my voice for about four days, and I wasn’t sure we were going to be able to start filming.”

“To be clear, he did pre-record the song, but he did sing it while we were filming. You can’t mime that song,” adds Cooper with a laugh.

“Yeah, I would scream it into a pillow oftentimes in the morning to try and recapture that rasp. By the end of it, I really liked the sound of my voice,” says White proudly.

White hopes audiences will see Bruce’s journey from despair to hope as inspiring.

“At the core of this film is a longing for connection and reaching out for communication and being grounded and present in life. That is what Bruce is after. Bruce is after a life in which he can one day meet Patti, have a family, and create the life he always wanted and the one he has today. So the message for me is to reach out.”