Robert Redford continues to fill out the cast for his next directorial project, as Susan Sarandon, Julie Christie and Richard Jenkins are the latest to join The Company You Keep. Redford will direct and star in the film that also features Shia LaBeouf, and recent additions Nick Nolte and Brit Marling. Based on the novel of the same name by Neal Gordon, the story centers on a wanted former Weather Underground militant (Redford) who goes on the run after an ambitious young reporter (LaBeouf) exposes his true identity.Deadline reports that Sarandon and Christie play ex-Weather Underground members, while Jenkins will play a college professor who is a link to other members in hiding. While the cast is pretty great, I’m hoping Redford tries a decidedly less heavy-handed approach than his last directorial projects. Hit the jump to read a synopsis of the novel.
Here’s the synopsis for The Company You Keep:
The revolutionary politics of the 1960s haunt the complacent domesticity of the 1990s in this engrossing, if sometimes muddled, melodrama of ideas. When limousine-leftist lawyer and single dad Jim Grant is unmasked as Jason Sinai, an ex-Weather Underground militant wanted for a deadly bank robbery, he abandons his daughter and goes on the lam. As he evades a manhunt and seeks out old comrades, the author introduces a sprawling cast of drug dealers, bomb-planting radicals turned leftist academics, Vietnam vets, FBI agents and Republicans who collectively ponder the legacy of the '60s. Gordon (Sacrifice of Isaac) skillfully combines a tense fugitive procedural, full of intriguing lore about false identities and techniques for losing a tail, with a nuanced exploration of boomer nostalgia and regret. Alas, there are a few too many long-winded, semicoherent debates about the radical excesses of the era that inadvertently evoke marijuana-fueled dormitory bull sessions. Through these exchanges (and a little sexual healing), ideological opposites come together over a facile anti-politics of "national reconciliation." Gordon's rueful radicals, having finally outgrown their adolescent outrage over parental hypocrisy, decide that personal loyalty and raising children trump all belief systems and that "none of the principles matter" any longer. Some who lived through the 1960s may take offense at this caricature, but other boomer readers may find the mix of countercultural drama and familial schmaltz a gratifying validation of their life cycle. In either case, it will get them talking. [Amazon]