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"You just moved to another town and pretend to be somebody you're not?" Sony Pictures Ent. has revealed an official trailer for a indie film titled Downtown Owl, set for a direct-to-vod / digital release later this April. This originally premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival last year and marks the directorial debut of the two actors Hamish Linklater & Lily Rabe. "Getting away from home to try and find it." Based on the novel of the same name by Chuck Klosterman, Downtown Owl is a sparkle dark Reagan Era comedy set in the fictional town of Owl, North Dakota in the leading days up to the region's most intense whiteout blizzard in a century in Minnesota. Lily Rabe stars as Julia, who escapes to this Reagan-era town of Owl for a temporary high school teaching job. Ed Harris, Vanessa Hudgens, Henry Golding, August Blanco Rosenstein, Jack Dylan Grazer, Arianna Jaffier, and...

It might sound like a backhanded compliment, but Downtown Owl feels more like a pilot than a feature film and may yet yield a series. In today’s market, that could work out just fine for directors Hamish Linklater and Lily Rabe, who, after a choppy start, finesse Chuck Klosterman’s digressive 2007 novel into a thoughtful, broad-canvas ensemble piece. T Bone Burnett helps nail things down with an eclectic alt-country score and soundtrack, infused with the music and spirit of Elvis Costello, but it’s Rabe that holds it all together onscreen with a controlled yet still wildly uninhibited performance.

After a flashforward to a white-out blizzard in January 1984, the action winds back nine months to the summer of 1983, which is when English teacher Julia Rabia (Rabe) swaps urban Milwaukee for the backwater of Owl, North Dakota, to take up a post in a remote school on the recommendation of her father.