The selling point for some when it comes to Meg Ryan‘s directorial debut Ithaca will be a reunion with her Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and Joe Versus the Volcano co-star Tom Hanks. However, the first trailer has arrived today, and they certainly aren’t the central focus. Instead, the drama — also starring Sam Shepard, Hamish Linklater, and Jack Quaid — follows the story of a younger brother whose sibling heads to WWII and he’s the bike messenger in his town.
“There was a day I thought, ‘Oh, man. I can’t protect my kid from everything.’ It’s a difficult moment,” Ryan tells EW about the genesis of the project. “I think it speaks to the complicated things happening [in the world], in the sense of community and cultivation of an individual’s integrity – what Saroyan believes are important antidotes. Hopefully Ithaca is about how fierce and frail life really is.”
Check out the trailer below, along with a poster, ahead of a release this fall.
When his older brother leaves to fight in the Second World War, fourteen-year-old Homer Macauley takes on a job as a bicycle telegraph messenger to provide for his widowed mother, his older sister and his younger brother. Homer delivers messages of love, hope, pain and death to the good people of Ithaca, but soon must grapple with a message that will change him forever. Based on Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Saroyan’s 1943 novel The Human Comedy, Ithaca is a coming-of-age story about the exuberance of youth, the abruptness of change, the sweetness of life, the sting of death, and the sheer goodness that lives in each and every one of us.
Ithaca opens on September 9th.