Jeremy Allen White has already agreed to take on the role of Bruce Springsteen in an upcoming biopic about the making of 1982’s stripped-down Nebraska. But will he sing?
“We’re gonna try,” White confirmed to Variety at the Tuesday premiere of his TV show The Bear. “We’re gonna try our best.”
The cast of Deliver Me to Nowhere is also rumored to include Paul Walter Hauser (Black Bird, Richard Jewell) as Springsteen’s longtime guitar tech Mike Batlan and Odessa Young (High Life, The Stand) as a love interest. Scott Cooper is directing the 20th Century Studios movie, which is based on Warren Zanes’ 2023 book of the same name.
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White revealed that he hasn’t met Springsteen yet, and that’s been a purposeful choice.
“We’ve communicated a little bit through some other people, but I hope this still all comes together,” he said. “We’ve still got a few things, we’ve got some timing stuff to work out – and I’m trying to have a bit of my own process with it before meeting the man, too. I wanna try to have an understanding, so when I meet him, I’ll have a bit of confidence somewhere in me to stand there.”
The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’
Springsteen originally completed a series of four-track song sketches in late 1981 and early 1982 in the hopes of presenting them for proper recording with the E Street Band. They ran through the songs, and drummer Max Weinberg has hailed the results. “It was killing; it was all very hard-edged,” he told Rolling Stone in 2010.
Ultimately, however, Springsteen decided to release the stripped-down demos as they were – and Nebraska became a platinum-selling Top 5 hit. “As great as it was, it wasn’t what Bruce wanted to release,” Weinberg added. “There is a full band Nebraska album, all of those songs are in the can somewhere.”
Springsteen liked some of what he heard at the so-called Electric Nebraska sessions. Several songs ended up on his subsequent Born in the U.S.A. album. Still, Springsteen manager Jon Landau has said that the E Street Band’s take on Nebraska will likely never see the light of day. “In my judgment,” he has said, “the right version of Nebraska came out.”
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