Looking to break their recent cycles of, respectively, raunchy action-comedies and action films that seem like comedies but are officially not, David Gordon Green and Nicolas Cage will team on the "gritty Southern drama" Joe, a film that does not call for anyone to get stoned and crash cars, nor for anyone to put on a black coat and go around burning things. Instead, it's a dark tale (drawn from Larry Brown's novel of the same name) of an ex-con who becomes something of a savior to a 15-year-old homeless kid looking to escape his malevolent drunk of a dad, with the two navigating a bleak, poverty-stricken Mississippi in search of a better life. In short, it's a surprisingly serious-sounding project and, though it is often more efficient to name the movies that Nicolas Cage will not star in next year, occasionally some of his projects deserve their own special consideration, particularly when they do not immediately sound ridiculous.
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