After much delay, Xavier Dolan’s lat­est final­ly gets a trailer

Xavier Dolan​‘s loy­al fan­base has been wait­ing a long time for The Death and Life of John F Dono­van, the Québé­cois auteur’s lat­est fea­ture and his first for­ay into Eng­lish-lan­guage work. Cast­ing was a years-long process, dras­tic edits near­ly halv­ing the film’s run time ate up even more months, and then Dolan sat on the fin­ished cut for near­ly anoth­er year before allow­ing it to pre­mière at last year’s Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Festival.

But the faith­ful have now been reward­ed, as the film’s first offi­cial trail­er has final­ly made it online by way of France.

The ambi­tious, decades-span­ning dra­ma takes as its focal point the bond between John Dono­van (Kit Har­ing­ton), a rak­ish movie star, and Rupert Turn­er, a devo­tee of the TV show that made Dono­van famous. As a child, Rupert (with the mop­pet face of Jacob Trem­blay) struck up a fond cor­re­spon­dence with the actor that gave him hope at a time when he had lit­tle to cher­ish in his life.

But the con­tro­ver­sy expect­ed from let­ters between a man and a boy broke out, leav­ing both of them bro­ken in tru­ly Dolan­ian melo­dra­mat­ic fash­ion. In the frame sto­ry, an adult Rupert (Ben Schnet­zer) lays out the whole sor­did tale to a reporter (Thandie New­ton) while pon­der­ing the tribu­la­tions of celebrity.

Dolan’s rep­u­ta­tion on the inter­na­tion­al cin­e­ma cir­cuit attract­ed a lot of big names to the project, includ­ing Susan Saran­don (as Donovan’s put-upon moth­er), Kathy Bates (as his agent), and Natal­ie Port­man (as Rupert’s con­cerned moth­er). Two more of those names were Jes­si­ca Chas­tain and Bel­la Thorne, rumored to be respec­tive­ly por­tray­ing a pow­er­ful pub­li­cist and her duti­ful assis­tant, but their per­for­mances end­ed up on the cut­ting room floor.

Recep­tion to the film was mixed up in Toron­to, where as many view­ers found the film to be a scat­ter­shot indul­gence as a naked­ly con­fes­sion­al work of qua­si-auto­bi­og­ra­phy. So, you know, it’s a new Xavier Dolan movie.

The Death and Life of John F Dono­van is released in French on 13 March. Dates for the UK and US have yet to be set.