Daniel Radcliffe goes undercover as a white supremacist in the Imperium trailer

Daniel Radcliffe stars in Imperium as Nate Foster, the type of idealistic federal agent who’s willing to shave his head, tattoo a bunch of racist garbage onto his body, and spend all his time with lowlife dirtbags in the service of his job. The young FBI analyst finds himself recruited by a senior agent (Toni Collette) and asked to go undercover as a neo-Nazi acolyte in order to thwart a radical right-wing terrorist group’s attempts to make a dirty bomb.

As The A.V. Club previously reported, the film is inspired by the real life story of Michael German, an FBI agent who spent time undercover in white supremacist groups before eventually co-writing the Imperium screenplay with director Daniel Ragussis. This is Ragussis’ first feature film; prior to this, he wrote and directed Haber, a 34-minute short about Nobel prize-winning German chemist Fritz Haber, the father of chemical weapons. Apparently, he has a thing for bald idealists harboring uneasy relationships with the Fatherland.

Imperium will debut in theaters and on demand August 19.