It’s Hol­ly­wood ver­sus Hearst in the full trail­er for Mank

In the event that you saw the teas­er trail­er for David Finch­er​‘s new film Mank ear­li­er this month and thought to your­self, ​“Neat clip, but I wish it had that thing where a bunch of char­ac­ters yell the protagonist’s name in dif­fer­ent tones of voice,” then you’re in luck. Today brings the full trail­er for the upcom­ing Old Hol­ly­wood peri­od piece, and the word on everyone’s lips is Mank.

The trail­er gives a fuller impres­sion of the man him­self and the sto­ry in which he’s land­ed, an obscure cor­ner of Gold­en Age his­to­ry in which art and com­merce come to trag­ic blows. The pro­duc­tion of Cit­i­zen Kane pit­ted screen­writer Her­man J. Mankiewicz (played in the film by a woozy, boozy Gary Old­man) against his thin­ly veiled sub­ject William Ran­dolph Hearst (Charles Dance), the famous­ly vin­dic­tive media tycoon, a David and Goliath sce­nario with indus­try-wide implications.

Mankiewicz and direc­tor Orson Welles (played by Tom Burke of The Sou­venir fame) grabbed the bull by the horns with their sto­ry of Charles Fos­ter Kane, a news­pa­per mag­nate method­i­cal­ly alien­at­ing every­one in his imme­di­ate vicin­i­ty with his greed, anger, jeal­ousy, and imma­tu­ri­ty. Hearst mar­shaled his con­sid­er­able pow­ers agains the pro­duc­tion, which nonethe­less attained the sta­tus of the con­sen­sus pick for great­est Amer­i­can film, though the con­tro­ver­sy-court­ing Mank end­ed up a casu­al­ty of this press war.

As we see in the trail­er, much like the char­ac­ter he brought to the page, Mank los­es the sup­port of his clos­est friends and loved ones; in his time of need, nei­ther Orson, nor stu­dio boss Louis B. May­er (Arliss Howard), nor Mank’s assort­ed female entan­gle­ments (Aman­da Seyfried, Tup­pence Mid­dle­ton, Lily Collins) come to the abra­sive and self-destruc­tive man’s aid. He descends into mis­ery and drink, con­signed to the foot­notes of the ages while Welles ascend­ed into the pantheon.

More­so than the pre­vi­ous pro­mo, this trail­er shows the ele­ments of Fincher’s visu­al style a bit more clear­ly, with mul­ti­ple-expo­sure super­im­posed images haunt­ing Mank’s thoughts like an aes­thet­ic ghost while cham­pagne cas­cades over a pyra­mid of glass­es else­where. Even those unin­ter­est­ed with the minu­ti­ae of behind-the-scenes squab­bles in ​’30s Tin­sel­town will still be able to savor a metic­u­lous­ly labored-over piece of film craft.

Mank will come to select the­aters in Novem­ber, and then arrive on Net­flix in the US and UK on 4 December.