For a time, Jeremy Allen White became Bruce Springsteen. But that doesn’t mean they share every opinion.

The actor recently reflected on stepping into the shoes of the legendary rocker to lead Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, his first big film since breaking out on the culinary drama The Bear. White told IMDb that, for the most part, he got along with Springsteen swimmingly. But diving into the details of the album at the film’s center — the introspective 1982 classic Nebraska — revealed a critical divergence point between the two.

“I had dinner at home with him and his wife, [Patti Scialfa], before we started filming. We got to talk about his music, and more specifically, we spoke a lot about ‘Reason to Believe.’ What I take away from that song, and what he thinks people misunderstand about that song,” White explained. “I believed that there was hope in that song, and he said, ‘That’s not the case.’”

White recalled pleading his case, proposing to Springsteen, “‘Don’t you feel that when you’re writing a song, you’re kind of giving it up?’ And he said, ‘I guess you’re right. If you want to feel that way, you can feel that way. But that’s not how that was intended.’”

“Reason to Believe” closes out Nebraska, a deeply personal, introspective album that Springsteen recorded by himself while living in isolated Colts Neck, N.J. The song channels one of Springsteen’s primary cited inspirations for the album, the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, in its own braiding together of four short vignettes on the theme of endurance in the face of adversity.

A woman waiting for a man who will never come, a groom waiting for a bride who won’t marry him, a dead dog moldering on the side of a highway beneath a man’s contemplative gaze — “Reason to Believe” is often interpreted as speculating how each character in the vignettes, well, finds a reason to keep believing. But according to the song’s very own author, the weary search for reasons is more the point than the restoration of belief.

Deliver Me From Nowhere was adapted from Warren Zanes’ 2023 book of the same name, which chronicles the making of Nebraska.

In a September interview with Entertainment Weekly, writer-director Scott Cooper shed some light on why, at that particular time in his life, Springsteen may have been more attracted to the dark than the light. “It wasn’t about Bruce Springsteen, the icon and stadium-filling rock star,” he shared. “It was about Bruce alone in a rented house, trying to understand himself and his unresolved trauma through song… I saw a cinematic portrait of an artist who was willing to strip himself bare.”

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is currently in theaters.

You can watch White’s full interview with IMDB above