Michelle Williams is being lined up for Jon­ah Hill’s direc­to­r­i­al debut

Jon­ah Hill is lin­ing up Michelle Williams to star in his direc­to­r­i­al debut, Mid ​’90s. Hav­ing earned plau­dits for her role in Ken­neth Lonergan’s Man­ches­ter by the Sea, the actor in report­ed­ly talks to play a moth­er again in Hill’s com­ing-of-age tale.

Hill has pre­vi­ous writ­ing expe­ri­ence with the Jump Street series and food-porn Pixar par­o­dy Sausage Par­ty, but he’s nev­er stepped behind the cam­era before. Direct­ing his own script, the sto­ry is set in 1990s Los Ange­les and will focus on Ste­vie, a skate­board­ing teenag­er and his first encoun­ters with alco­hol, drugs and sex. Don’t expect Jump Street style antics though – accord­ing to Dead­line Mid ​’90s won’t be as light-heart­ed as Hill’s pre­vi­ous screen­play work:

“Ste­vie strug­gles with the var­i­ous roles he must play in life: sur­ro­gate part­ner to his co-depen­dent sin­gle moth­er (Williams), receiv­er of abuse from his trou­bled old­er broth­er, and invis­i­ble stand-in to his wealth­i­er school friends. As Ste­vie inch­es his way into accep­tance of the crew of skate­board­ers, he deals with issues of class, race and socioe­co­nom­ic priv­i­lege and under-priv­i­lege he’s nev­er expe­ri­enced before. Stevie’s moth­er must deal with her son grow­ing fur­ther and fur­ther apart from her, which spins her out of control.”

Hill impressed us with his tran­si­tion from com­e­dy to dra­ma in stand­out sup­port­ing turns in Mon­ey­ball and The Wolf of Wall Street, and we’ll have to wait and see whether he’ll be able to emu­late that tonal shift as suc­cess­ful­ly in his writ­ing and direct­ing. Cast­ing an actor of Williams’ pedi­gree cer­tain­ly feels like a step in the right direction.

Pro­duc­tion is sched­uled to begin lat­er this year, with Williams also set to start work on Todd Haynes’ Won­der­struck and Sean Durkin’s hot­ly antic­i­pat­ed fol­low-up Martha Mar­cy May Mar­lene, a Janis Joplin biopic sim­ply titled, Janis.