Renée Zell­weger goes over the rain­bow in the Judy trailer

Renée Zell­weger, once a house­hold name as the chron­i­cal­ly sin­gle Brid­get Jones and an Oscar nom­i­nee as Chicago’s Rox­ie Hart, has spent some time out of the spot­light as of late. She’s begun to reestab­lish her pub­lic pres­ence over the past cou­ple of years — a Brid­get Jones sequel, a cou­ple indies — but she’s now ready­ing her prop­er return to pres­tige and prominence.

The offi­cial trail­er for Judy appeared online this morn­ing, show­cas­ing a resur­gent Zell­weger in the lead role of Judy Gar­land. It’s a warts-and-all per­for­mance with a know­ing bent, as one actress sub­ject to harsh media scruti­ny and tabloid feed­ing fren­zies breathes life back into another.

The biopic joins Gar­land in 1969, with her girl­hood star­dom in The Wiz­ard of Oz and Meet Me in St. Louis fad­ing into mem­o­ry. As she con­tends with sub­stance abuse issues, per­son­al finance issues, and child cus­tody issues, she trav­els to Lon­don for a res­i­den­cy of per­for­mances she hopes will be a come­back for her career.

Caked with make­up and bedecked with a spiky black hair­piece, Zell­weger trem­bles her way through a per­for­mance of fragili­ty and resilience com­plete with full-throat­ed musi­cal num­bers dis­play­ing the vocal tal­ent that hasn’t dimin­ished one iota. It’s a three-course role, com­plete with touch­es of tragedy, humor, and romance (Gar­land has a whirl­wind courtship with the musi­cian Mick­ey Deans, por­trayed here by Finn Wit­trock), the sort actors are always hunt for.

But there’s an accent­ed dimen­sion in the neigh­bor­hood of camp to it as well. When divas play divas, that’s always a pos­si­bil­i­ty, and the footage revealed today promis­es a bit of over-the-top haugh­ti­ness to go with a more human ele­ment. In that respect, the film may embody the spir­it of Gar­land her­self more ful­ly than it even realizes.

Judy comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 27 Sep­tem­ber, and then the UK on 4 October.