The Debut Trailer Is Ridiculously Charming

For a certain type of movie person, the trailer for The Debut ticks off a checklist of things certain to have them foaming at the mouth. Julianne Moore playing a housewife struggling to break out of her malaise? Check. Paul Giamatti playing a man who has grown increasingly embittered but is soft at his core? Double check! A central premise that allows us to engage with the beauty of art that is not predicated on capitalistic success? Triple check! In poker terms, that’s what we call a royal flush.

The movie, written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, stars Moore as Mona Friedman, a nearly empty nester who auditions for a musical at her local New Jersey community theater. Giamatti plays Jerry, the director who casts Mona because nobody else auditions for the role. The two then spend the movie alternatively at odds, with him demanding more and more out of her performance, and growing together. “Every single thing you are doing is not working,” he tells her at one point. Then, we see a bit of her performance and learn that Jerry is, in fact, right.

The film also stars Eisenberg, Halle Bailey, Havana Rose Liu, and musical-theater icon Bernadette Peters. There is no confirmed release date yet, though hopefully, it’s this year so we can get a solid awards campaign out of Moore. She hasn’t been nominated since winning Best Actress in 2015 for Still Alice. They owe her this one after snubbing May December.