Fame devours Ana de Armas as Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe in the first Blonde trailer

With yesterday’s tec­ton­ic announce­ment of the Venice Film Fes­ti­val pro­gram comes a wave of after­shocks in the form of teasers meant to drum up excite­ment for the titles soon to be unveiled — such as Andrew Dominik​‘s long-await­ed Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe pic­ture Blonde. In and out of devel­op­ment hell for the past ten years, the adap­ta­tion of Joyce Car­ol Oates‘ nov­el of the same name is done, it exists, and we’ll all get to see it in two short months.

Until then, Net­flix is stok­ing the public’s excite­ment with a trail­er that gives us a first sam­pling of Ana de Armas‘ per­for­mance in the lead role, one effer­ves­cent onscreen sex sym­bol chan­nel­ing anoth­er. While her accent work will sure­ly prove divi­sive between those who demand absolute fideli­ty and those allow­ing for a more expres­sion­is­tic take on Mon­roe, there’s no deny­ing that her look has been repli­cat­ed with almost chill­ing accu­ra­cy, going past the beau­ty mark and blonde curls and into the bones of de Armas’ face.

Blonde fol­lows Mon­roe dur­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly tur­bu­lent peri­od in her trag­ic life, as mul­ti­ple forces bore down on her slight shoul­ders: the car­niv­o­rous effects of celebri­ty, the dom­i­neer­ing influ­ence of the men in her orbit (includ­ing Adrien Brody as third hus­band Arthur Miller and Bob­by Can­navale as sec­ond hus­band Joe DiMag­gio), the even­tu­al depen­den­cy on the drugs that would cut her days short. As she explains in voiceover, the ​‘Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe’ we all know was a fig­ment of the show­biz imag­i­na­tion, the Nor­ma Jeane she was born hid­den from the pry­ing eyes of the paparazzi and auto­graph chasers.

It’s a stur­dy idea on which to hang a movie star por­trait, and almost always true, but still decid­ed­ly well-worn for a film that ear­ly buzz had pegged as a rejoin­der to the typ­i­cal biopic for­mu­la. The rumored scads of explic­it sex set­ting this apart from the pack make no appear­ance in the trail­er — which makes sense, these have to play in the­aters before mass-release movies — but it does leave the ques­tion of what makes this dif­fer­ent from, say, My Week with Marilyn.

What’s con­firmed by the clips below is that this will be a severe­ly gor­geous film, the cin­e­matog­ra­phy from Chayse Irvin (best known for his work on Bey­once​‘s Lemon­ade and Spike Lee​‘s BlacK­kKlans­man, the rav­ish­ing God’s Crea­tures due to be added to that list upon its release) cap­tur­ing the lus­ter of vin­tage film­strips from Monroe’s era. How the shifts between col­or and black-and-white will be orga­nized remains a mys­tery, but one that’ll be solved before long with show­ings at Venice and (in all like­li­hood) Toronto.

Blonde comes to Net­flix world­wide on 28 September.