Mar­tin Scors­ese and Jon­ah Hill will team up on a Jer­ry Gar­cia biopic

He’s not fol­low­ing the tour­ing band around on the road and drop­ping acid or any­thing, but Mar­tin Scors­ese​’s a true Dead­head. He stepped in as exec­u­tive pro­duc­er on Amir Bar-Lev’s Grate­ful Dead doc­u­men­tary Long Strange Trip back in 2017, and now he’s announced a new project that will raise his jam band street cred to the next level.

Dead­line has the exclu­sive that an Apple-front­ed biopic of Grate­ful Dead front­man Jer­ry Gar­cia will be Scorsese’s next direc­to­r­i­al gig after his cur­rent­ly in-pro­duc­tion West­ern film Killers of the Flower Moon, a Boomer-cat­nip set­up that has nonethe­less inspired con­nip­tions of excite­ment in cinephiles of all ages. And to play the beard­ed, con­ge­nial, con­stant­ly high gui­tarist of leg­end, Scors­ese has tapped his past col­lab­o­ra­tor and pal Jon­ah Hill, a guy who pret­ty much fits the descrip­tion begin­ning this sentence.

Gar­cia chan­neled the cur­rents of the ​’60s coun­ter­cul­ture into a deep cat­a­logue of clas­sic albums that those alive dur­ing his hey­day now asso­ciate with good times, peace, and love. Though his music has turned him into an avatar of chill vibes, his per­son­al life was marred by the same dif­fi­cul­ties plagu­ing most rock stars – addic­tions to hero­in and cocaine, resul­tant health prob­lems, a sad­ly pre­ma­ture death.

It’s a log­i­cal choice for Scors­ese, whose body of work has con­stant­ly focused on the titans of the gold­en-oldie era beyond the Dead in spe­cif­ic, from the Rolling Stones to Bob Dylan to George Har­ri­son to The Band. If any­one can be relied on to eschew the clich­es of the increas­ing­ly hide­bound musi­cian biopic form, it’s Mar­ty, and it helps that the script will come from Scott Alexan­der and Lar­ry Karaszews­ki, old hands in this genre.

The most curi­ous prospect will be Hill’s per­for­mance as Gar­cia, pre­sum­ably a more dialed-back show­ing than we’re used to from the often tetchy, high-ener­gy actor. Grate­ful Dead schol­ar Jor­dan Hoff­man has already point­ed to Hill’s turn in the recent Don’t Wor­ry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot as a pos­si­ble pre­view, the weighty calm of his role as a recov­er­ing addict very much in line with Garcia’s serenity.