Jason Reitman had a lot of fun in a politics-adjacent arena with Thank You For Smoking. He's jumping fully into the political side of things with his latest, The Front Runner, which has just started shooting. The star of the movie is Hugh Jackman, who has used his twitter account to debut a look at his role.
Jackman is playing real-life US politician Gary Hart, who was part of a fascinating, controversial story. Hart, a charismatic senator from Colorado became the Democratic frontrunner for the presidential nomination in 1988, and all seemed to be going well until a political and personal landmine detonated, with news breaking that he had had an affair, and he dropped out of the race. The rest of the story saw Michael Dukakis scoring the nomination and losing to George HW Bush.
Reitman wrote the script alongside political journalist Matt Bai and former Hilary Clinton press secretary Jay Carson, adapting Bai's 2015 book All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid. The focus besides the story will be on how the scandal opened up a fresh vein in American politics and the media, with personal stories once more becoming fair game.
The cast for the film also includes J.K. Simmons (a Reitman fixture), Vera Farmiga (who scored an Oscar nomination for the director's Up In The Air), Mamoudou Athie, Josh Brener, Sarah Paxton, Ari Graynor and Tommy Dewey (who has his own Reitman connection through Hulu series Casual). As of right now, there is no official release date for the movie.