After his brutally piercing trio of features thus far with Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Nest, and The Iron Claw, director Sean Durkin is looking to lighten the mood. He’s set to write and direct an adaptation of Holly Brickley’s debut novel Deep Cuts, which just arrived on bookshelves this week and tells a love story of two music-obsessed twenty-somethings in the 2000s.
Deadline reports Saoirse Ronan and Austin Butler will star in the feature, which is set up at A24 with Ronan also on board as a producer, alongside Ronald Bronstein, Eli Bush, and Josh Safdie. Ronan will next be seen in Jonatan Etzler’s Bad Apples while Butler is gearing up for a big summer with Ari Aster’s Eddington and Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing.
Check out an interview with Holly Brickley below about her novel, as well as an official synopsis from Amazon and a playlist of every song featured in the book.
It’s a Friday night in a campus bar in Berkeley, fall of 2000, and Percy Marks is pontificating about music again. Hall and Oates is on the jukebox, and Percy—who has no talent for music, just lots of opinions about it—can’t stop herself from overanalyzing the song, indulging what she knows to be her most annoying habit. But something is different tonight. The guy beside her at the bar, fellow student Joe Morrow, is a songwriter. And he could listen to Percy talk all night.
Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs—and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again. Is their collaboration worth its cost? Or is it holding Percy back from finding her own voice?
Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard.
