As always, David Gordon Green is zigging instead of zagging, side-stepping any expectations of the career choices he “should” be making and following his passion wherever it takes him. With “Prince Avalanche” now in theaters, and the upcoming “Manglehorn” starring Al Pacino gearing up to shoot this fall, Green will take a pit stop between those two efforts in Venice and Toronto to present his latest, “Joe,” and it seems both director and star Nicolas Cage are very excited about how this one turned out.
“It’s Nicolas Cage in a movie that’s not like anything Nicolas Cage has done before. It’s dark as fuck. It’s a slow-burn, dark, heavy movie. Very grim,” Green told us in January. Co-starring “Mud” and “Tree Of Life” star Tye Sheridan, the film is based on the novel by Larry Brown, and tells the story of the unlikely bond between an ex-con (Cage) who becomes a role model to a 15 year-old (Sheridan) from a broken home, and their journey on the path to redemption and the quest for a better life in southern town.
“I think David had a vision of me for this movie, and he’s a young, enthusiastic artist who knew what to do with me and I think he found a new way of reinventing me,” Cage told us in Berlin, so we’re definitely making this a priority on our fall festival slate.
Below you’ll find the official synopsis along with a batch of new pictures from the movie.
A gripping mix of friendship, violence and redemption erupts in the contemporary backwoods South in this adaptation of Larry Brown’s novel, celebrated at once for its grit and its deeply moving core. Academy Award winner Nicolas Cage comes back to his indie roots in the title role as the hard-living, hot-tempered ex-con Joe Ransom, who is just trying to dodge his own instinct for trouble until he meets a hard-luck kid (Tye Sheridan) who awakens in him a fierce and tender-hearted protector.
