Music helped him to deliver

Springsteen's songs speak to Jeremy Allen White as he steps into the musician's shoes.

- BY GLENN WHIPP

JEREMY Allen White portrays Bruce Springsteen during the creation of his 1982 album "Nebraska" in Scott Cooper's "Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere."

Jeremy Allen White asked all the questions any normal human being would ask when offered the chance to play Bruce Springsteen in “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.”

In theaters Oct. 24, it’s a movie that examines a slice of the rock legend’s career when he was battling depression and creating 1982's incomparable exploration of alienation, “Nebraska,” a record he didn't know he was making when he recorded the songs on a primitive four-track tape machine in a rented New Jersey home. It turned out to be his favorite of all his albums.

Most of those questions could be boiled down to: Why me? White didn’t know how to play the guitar. He loves to sing but would never call himself a singer. And while he has a relationship with an audience, particularly those who have white-knuckled their way through his Emmy-winning work as Carmy, the talented and troubled chef on “The Bear,” he says it’s a far cry from the bond Springsteen has forged with his fan base for the last 50-plus years.

“The relationship a musician has with fans is so intimate,” White, 34, tells me the morning after the movie had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. “You listen to him in the car, you go to see him live. He’s there in your ear and it’s just the two of you. You feel like you're being spoken to. Bruce is so important to so many people. It was daunting. I didn’t want to disappoint.”

By the time we talked, though, White was well past any anxiety about disappointing, if only because he had the approval of the person who mattered the most: Springsteen himself.