Sarandon & Gideon Adlon Saddle Up for Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s “Mustang”

Susan Sarandon might revert to some Sister Helen Prejean (Dead Man Walking) counsellor skillset for her next role. Deadline reports that the veteran actress along with newbie Gideon Adlon will encircle Matthias Schoenaerts’ fragmented character in Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s Mustang. Sarandon will play the prison therapist, and Adlon is Roman’s daughter. Production begins this month in Nevada. Legende’s Alain Goldman (pictured) is producing while Molly Hallam will serve as executive producer. Jason Mitchell and Bruce Dern also star. Focus Features is distributing and handling world rights.

Gist: Schoenaerts stars as Roman, a convict who is given the chance to participate in the rehabilitation-therapy program training wild mustangs. Roman forms a strong bond with a particularly difficult horse, which forces him to confront his harsh past and innermost demons.

Worth Noting: Writing creds are curiously split between three folks: Clermont-Tonnerre wrote with scribe Brock Norman Brock (Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson) and filmmaker Mona Fastvold (The Sleepwalker).

Do We Care?: Aside from the cast clout and what might be a perfectly calibrated brute and tender heart role for Schoenaerts (we’ve more or less seen examples of these traits in Rust and Bone, Disorder and more recently Racer and the Jailbird), having already explored this human-animal paired world with her Sundance Film Fest winning 2014 award-winning short Rabbit, Clermont-Tonnerre’s Sundance Labs workshopped project appears to be on solid footing and hopefully it’ll capture more than inner demons. With Ruben Impens (Raw and Felix van Groeningen’s works) on board as the cinematographer, this should suit Cannes programmers’ Euro-Americana sensibilities just perfectly.