The first trailer for Coming Through the Rye has been released, following a boy (Alex Wolff) in 1969 whose only ambition is to adapt the elusive author J.D. Salinger‘s (Chris Cooper) The Catcher in the Rye. To do so, he has to travel cross country to get permission from the scribe himself. Along the way he runs into a girl, and the pair’s trip changes from a search for answers to an exploration of love, sexual awakening, and loss. You know, coming of age stuff.
Directed and co-penned by James Steven Sadwith, and apparently based on a true story, the trailer attempts to strike a balance between youthful romance and the crushing realities of aging and disappointments. What remains to be seen is if the film can find its own unique tone to create something poignant. See the trailer, along with a poster below, for the film that also stars Adrian Pasdar and Stefania Lavie.
Based on the Emmy Award-winning filmmaker’s own true story, 16-year-old Jamie Schwartz (Alex Wolff) wants desperately to be a worldly adolescent. Unhappy at his all-boys boarding school, his life raft is the belief that he will someday play Holden Caulfield—the complex and alienated main character from the iconic novel The Catcher in the Rye—on Broadway and in the movies. He adapts the novel as a play and runs away to the mountains of New Hampshire to search for the book’s reclusive author, JD Salinger (Academy Award winner Chris Cooper). Along the way he is picked up by a local girl, DeeDee Gorlin (Stefania Owen). Their odyssey and the events that follow are a journey into the meanings of friendship, sex, love and loss.
Coming Through the Rye opens October 14th.