Brow Beat

The first foray into film from Sopranos-creator David Chase premiered at the New York Film Festival recently, and the trailer was just released today. The writer-director has reteamed with Tony Soprano himself, James Gandolfini, for the coming-of-age drama Not Fade Away, which is set in New Jersey in the 1960s. A group of college kids, led by Doug (John Magaro), form a rock ‘n’ roll band; Gandolfini play’s Doug’s father. With the Rolling Stones’ “Parachute Woman” setting the teen-angst mood, the trailer revels in several bildungsroman clichés: the disapproving father, the tempting love interest, the tribulations that come with charting your own rebellious course, etc.

Of course, on the surface, The Sopranos might have looked like a tissue of clichés as well, so we’ll hold out hope for the moment—though Eric Kohn at IndieWire says the movie as a whole is just as formulaic as it appears. Chase’s film “seems more committed to covering a lot of ground than saying anything new,” he writes. On television, Chase had hours and hours to unfold the complexities of a story that might have seemed initially familiar. Can he accomplish a similar task here in just a couple hours?

We’ll find out in December: Not Fade Away comes out in limited release just before Christmas.