For months last year, Jeremy Allen White had Bruce Springsteen constantly speaking into his ears.

White was listening, over and over, to Springsteen’s 18-hour audio narration of his memoir, “Born to Run,” as part of extensive preparation to play him in the forthcoming film “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” which dramatizes the rock icon’s struggles to make his 1982 album, “Nebraska.”

“That was on in the house all the time,” White, best known as the star of the FX series “The Bear,” recalled in a recent video interview. “When I’d go for a run, when I’m going for a walk, when I’m making dinner. It was helpful to have his voice with me all the time.”

“Deliver Me From Nowhere,” written and directed by Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart”) and set to be released Oct. 24, has its share of the high-decibel heroics endemic to rock biographies, like a sweat-drenched White belting out “Born to Run” to a roaring arena crowd or jamming before a smaller gang of the Jersey Shore faithful at the Stone Pony.

But by focusing on “Nebraska” — a gallery of desperate, despairing characters, rendered in starkly acoustic form — and the depressive breakdown that Springsteen experienced in the aftermath of its creation, the film instead tells a story about the fragility of mental health and the limits of art alone to sustain it. In one striking scene, adapted directly from Springsteen’s memoir, the man usually seen as the platonic ideal of the stadium-commanding rock titan enters a therapist’s office and, without uttering a word, erupts in tears.

Cooper’s goal, he said, “was never about telling the whole story of Bruce Springsteen.”

“I was striving to make something that was quieter and more interior, which is about this very specific time in Bruce’s life,” the director added, “about a man who’s facing some of the trauma that he’s been carrying since childhood.”