Every once in a while a former teen star, especially those from the Disney stable, likes to push their image into new territory and prove they can do more than be jolly or jump around singing. Vanessa Hudgens started a while ago, and briefly went even further with this year’s Spring Breakers. Now, for Gimme Shelter (no, not a weird remake of the Rolling Stones doc), she’s trying something a little less gonzo and a little more uplifting amongst the grit. The first trailer is now online.
Based on a true story, Gimme Shelter finds Hudgens as Agnes “Apple” Bailey, a young woman who has never had an easy life. Her mother, June Bailey (Rosario Dawson), is an addict and prostitute, is verbally and physically abusive, and is grooming her daughter to follow in her footsteps. Apple knows the streets, alleys and motels like the back of her hand, but wants more from her life. She possesses a tenacious, tough, indomitable spirit, and will not surrender to fate.
Apple runs away from her mother and tracks down her father whom she has never known, as he was only 19 when he got Apple’s mother pregnant. Apple begs her now Wall Street Broker father, Tom Fitzpatrick (Brendan Fraser), to take her in. In the few days under her father’s care, she learns she’s become pregnant by a kid from the streets she met on the train, who now wants nothing to do with her. She is forced to leave her father’s home because of her choice to give birth to the baby she is carrying.
Apple runs away again, and is eventually taken under the wing of Father McCarthy (James Earl Jones), the chaplain of the local hospital, after almost getting herself killed. He offers to let Apple live at a shelter for pregnant young women run by a spiritual woman named Kathy (Ann Dowd)…
Chances are you might be able to guess the rest, but if you didn’t the trailer will almost certainly lay it out for you, which is disappointing. The fact that the film has been sitting waiting for release for more than a year isn’t a good sign either. Still, American audiences will see **Gimme Shelter **on January 24. There’s no word on a UK date yet.