While Ruben Fleischer and his Gangster Squad cast and crew are still busy grabbing the last few shots for the movie, which won’t arrive over here until next November, the first official look is now online over at Entertainment Weekly, and you can take a look at Josh Brolin and Sean Penn in character below.

EW has also shoved director Ruben Fleischer into an interrogation room in order to get some answers from him about the film and his reasons for choosing it to follow up comic efforts Zombieland and 30 Minutes Or Less. “I was just looking for an opportunity to try something new, and when I read the script, I was completely passionate about it. I think that passion and that love for Los Angeles and the love for this period of time and the love for this genre kind of swayed any misgivings the studio might have had. It’s been a real step forward for me. The size and scale and period – and just the LA of it – makes the movie singular and special.”

Gangster Squad was crafted by Will Beall from a series of articles written by Paul Lieberman for the LA Times, which revealed the real-life efforts of dedicated cops in the 1940s trying to stop an influx of East Coast gangsters into the city.

“It’s a good leaping-off point,” says Fleischer. “We’ve taken some creative license but tried to stay true to the original story and characters as much as possible. O’Mara (Brolin), our lead character, has just come back from fighting the Nazis with all these ideals after seeing America at its greatest. And he’s come home and there’s a gangster running his city. While he was gone, Mickey Cohen (Penn) took over and he turned the streets of LA into a battle zone. In our story, O’ Mara takes the lead of the Gangster Squad, a vigilante police force that fights the gangsters on their own terms, and the battle between them is for the future of Los Angeles: whether it’s going to become corrupt and run by this bunch of gangsters or these guys who fought for these values and want LA to be the shining beacon on the West Coast that it was always intended to be."

For more from Fleischer, head to EW. Gangster Squad also features Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Giovanni Ribisi, Robert Patrick, Nick Nolte, Michael Pena, Anthony Mackie, Josh Pence and Mireille Enos. It’ll be out on November 9, 2012.