Jeremy Allen White, like a lot of people, has a bit of a crush on Bruce Springsteen.
“Oh he’s very, very handsome,” says White, gazing at the 1978 NME cover we’ve just handed him. On it, The Boss has his fists raised to camera, as if ready to throw a deadly right hook. He wears a tight, white vest with black, bold text stamped across the midriff: “BRUCE IS THE WORD”.
“He started lifting weights after ‘Born In The U.S.A.’ and put on all this weight,“ continues White, perched on a plush armchair in his suite at west London’s extremely swanky Claridge’s hotel. He’s explaining why the skinny punk photographed bears little resemblance to the classic image of a famous, musclebound rock and roll hammer who was forged in New Jersey’s roughest nightclubs. “He’s really scraggly here. He’s wiry. But still tough… and very handsome!”
It’s unsurprising White is a bit obsessed with Bruce, because his job for more than a year now has been to know everything he can about the man. He acts, sings and strums guitar as Springsteen in each frame of new film Deliver Me From Nowhere. He even blows a little harmonica, too. And this isn’t your usual cradle-to-grave musical that sweeps uncomfortable truths beneath the carpet. Adapted from Warren Zanes’ bestseller of the same name, it is the anti-Bohemian Rhapsody. A focused and intimate portrayal of Springsteen at his lowest ebb. A moment when, instead of following up his first number one record ‘The River’ (1980) with another chart-bothering epic, he squirrelled himself away in a small cottage on the East Coast to make the extremely un-radio-friendly acoustic album ‘Nebraska’. Dealing with long-suppressed childhood trauma around his relationship with paranoid schizophrenic, alcoholic father Doug, the lyrics laid bare Bruce’s deep emotional wounds. Writing them kickstarted what he calls in 2016 autobiography Born To Run, his “first real major depression”.
So this is pretty heavy stuff. Definitely not the bump-free tale of a talented (and yes, handsome) All-American-boy-come-good. White’s performance, all tortured, empty stares and head-down ruminating, is remarkable, but not because of any uncanny physical likeness. In truth, White doesn’t look much like Bruce at all. His face is tanned and attractive in a well-groomed Hollywood way, whereas the Bruce of ‘Nebraska’ still had a rugged, everyman appeal to him. And, as White himself described at the beginning of our interview, Springsteen had yet to develop the rippling muscles that today bulge out of his portrayer’s smart, black shirt. What White does have, though, is some of that same E Street swagger.
It’s there when he saunters off down the hall, Liam Gallagher-style, for a sneaky cigarette break between interviews. And you can see it when he greets the gaggle of young girls who’ve been waiting outside the hotel all day to give him a bunch of red roses. He might be newly mega-famous – and really only for one show (Emmy-winning restaurant drama The Bear) – but White already oozes easy rock star cool.
Director Scott Cooper says White was always first choice to play Bruce. “He has a quiet intensity and an honest vulnerability. He’s isn’t afraid to appear weak,” the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Crazy Heart reveals. “He shares the humility that Bruce has – and you see it in his physicality, the way he moves on stage and the way he walks.” Springsteen, who had seen The Bear and loved it, was equally excited and gave White the thumbs up immediately.
“He shares the humility Bruce has”
–Scott Cooper
With the need to acquire song licenses for the likes of ‘Atlantic City’, ‘Born To Run’ and ‘Born In The U.S.A.’, it was imperative that Cooper keep Bruce happy. And so he was heavily involved, perhaps more involved than any musician has been in their own biopic. He read the script before anyone else. He fed back on the cast. And he visited set most days. But he never interfered or tried to have anything changed – not a given in our age of vanity project pop star documentaries.
“Bruce’s only direction to me, when I was writing, directing or editing it…” remembers Cooper, “was that he wanted me to give him ‘a Scott Cooper movie’. He said: ‘Don’t sand off the edges, don’t let the audience off the hook.’”
No one who’s sat through the film (and Springsteen has 11 times already, according to Cooper), could argue he ignored that advice. The flashbacks – involving a kid Bruce (played by nine-year-old Matthew Anthony Pellicano) cowering in his room, terrified of dad’s unpredictable moods – are brutal. They were especially so for the real-life Springsteen, watching from the sidelines. “There were moments when Bruce left set or just said: ‘You know what, I don’t think I want to be there today for this’,” says Cooper. “Most of the scenes with his father were hard for him.”
A big reason these flashbacks are so powerful is Stephen Graham. If you’ve witnessed the Liverpudlian legend swinging his fists in This Is England or crumbling emotionally as a heartbroken pop in Adolescence, you’ll know how devastating he can be on screen. Doug ‘Dutch’ Springsteen sits among his best work – a man who loves his wife and boy, but whose crippling mental health problems prevent him from expressing that love and, in some cases, cause him to inflict his own pain upon them.
In one gut-wrenching sequence, Doug is drunk and attempts to mould his shy, scrawny son into a steely lad with some good, old-fashioned punching practice. He grows increasingly frustrated with Bruce’s lack of enthusiasm and eventually slaps him to the ground. Later, the young boy has apparently internalised this violence because he whacks his dad on the shoulders with a baseball bat while he shouts at mum Adele (played by Gaby Hoffmann) in the kitchen. Doug, both shocked and pleased, laughs.
“I listened to the audio book [of Springsteen’s autobiography] for research, because Bruce narrates it,” says Graham. “And I noticed that he changes the tone of his voice whenever he speaks about his dad… There’s a gravitas to it and it’s a completely unconscious thing that he did because when I mentioned it to him, he had no idea.”
There are two other pivotal relationships in the story of ‘Nebraska’. First is Bruce’s with Faye (played by Odessa Young), a girlfriend who comes into his life just as he is sliding towards misery. There’s only one short line in Born To Run dedicated to the character, so Cooper had to cobble together a “composite” outline from various sources including private conversations with Springsteen.
“Bruce was telling me things that he’s never spoken about in his autobiography, his Broadway show, documentaries,” says Cooper. “I said: ‘Tell me about the women in your life during this time.’ And he said it was painful, because he wanted to give himself over to them, but he kept making the same mistake [of pulling away] because he wasn’t dealing with the unresolved trauma with his father. And he was also suffering from undiagnosed depression at the time, too.”
The second relationship is Bruce’s with Jon Landau (played by Succession favourite Jeremy Strong). The former journalist famously gave Springsteen’s career a hefty boost in 1974 when he wrote in The Real Paper: “I saw rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” They became friends and four years later, after a messy split from first manager Mike Appel, Bruce asked Landau to step in. The beefy New Yorker has been his partner in crime’s closest ally ever since. He fought hardest for ‘Nebraska’ to be released when close-minded Columbia Records execs balked at the tracks’ dark nature.
“That album definitely wouldn’t have been made [without Landau],” agrees Strong. “A central part of their relationship was that Jon was a fan first. He didn’t know how to manage. He wasn’t a businessman at all – and he told that to Bruce. But Bruce had this experience with Appel, who was a different kind of manager with more commercial aspirations and [he liked] Landau’s deeper, spiritual connection to music.”
While it was key to get the different characters right, nailing the music was paramount. Keen on authenticity, Cooper asked White to play guitar and sing throughout. This was a problem. White could barely carry a tune and had never actually held a guitar, let alone thrashed out a solo. He had just six months to reach a standard worthy of Bruce Springsteen – one of rock’s greatest living entertainers.
Understandably panicked, he reached out to those who could help. A patient teacher enabled him to wrap his fingers around the chords. Bruce himself flew over a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the closest he could find to the acoustic heard on ‘Nebraska’. And he worked with vocal coach Eric Vetro, who got Timothée Chalamet into singing shape for A Complete Unknown.
“What I wanted to achieve with Jeremy was that you really get lost [in his performance], to feel like you’re not watching Jeremy Allen White anymore. You’re just watching Bruce Springsteen,” says Vetro during a Zoom call from his LA home. “And, you know, some of the songs were much easier than others. ‘Nebraska’ is easier to sing than the song ‘Atlantic City’, for example, and certainly ‘Atlantic City’ is easier than ‘Born To Run’… I remember, the first day he did ‘Born To Run’, he really overdid it.”
Vetro is referring to Deliver Me From Nowhere’s showstopper concert scene, in which the E Street Band blast through his signature 1975 hit like a suicide machine on Highway 9. “My throat was torn to shreds,” says White. “It’s a very physical and very difficult song to perform… I felt like I was forcing it and singing so much from my throat and my chest in order to capture the sound I wanted to. It knocked me out and I lost my voice. I couldn’t speak for days.” Vetro, in a mentorly tone, says White simply “didn’t warm up properly” and if he’d been “eased” into it more he’d have been fine.
This week, fans will finally be able to see the full fruits of White and Vetro’s creation. They’ll be tricky to please. Delve into the deeper corners of the internet and you’ll find some Spring-nuts (as his most ardent supporters call themselves) already criticising the two-minute trailer. As with hardcore Swifties or Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters, there is a fierce desire to protect the legacy of their idol. And woe betide anyone who doesn’t pass muster.
White isn’t really worried about that though. The approval he craves won’t come from a middle-aged bloke who’s bought every tour tee since the mid-’80s. It’ll come from The Boss himself. Was there a moment he felt like he’d earned it?
“There was, yeah,” says White, grinning. “The first time I recorded ‘Nebraska’, which was the first time I was really singing on set… I knew Bruce was there that day, but I didn’t want to see him on my way to set. I needed to stay in what I was doing. He found me afterwards and he looked me in my eyes, gave me a hug and held me. That gave me a tremendous amount of confidence going forward to finish the film.”
‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ is in UK cinemas from October 24
Eric Vetro’s BBC Maestro course ‘Sing Like the Stars’ is available here