Rob Lowe Cast In Mark Pellington's 'I Melt With You'

Mark Pellington is putting together a not-so-obvious cast for his upcoming small-budget thriller, I Melt With You. The director already has Jeremy Piven and Thomas Jane, which left two big roles to cast. Now one of them has been filled by Rob Lowe.Deadline says "Lowe will play a doctor struggling with deep personal loss and a growing drug addiction." So he'll be among the four interconnected lives that are the story's basis; we still don't know specifics about Jane and Piven's roles, and there's one big one left to cast.

I'm curious to see where Pellington takes this. He hatched the story with Glenn Porter, who wrote the script, and is shooting the film on a rather small $1m budget. Here's what he previously had to say about the film:

I am 48 and  found a dearth of of films that speak to my life experience...Where is my generation's  version of Cassavetes' Husbands? It is hard to get anything idiosyncratic made for a budget. I have been shooting music videos on small cameras at low cost and wanted to apply it to a film. This is about four guys and deals with mortality, aging and friendhip. It is very dark and very low budget. I have nothing against the larger budget movies I have made. I just want to make movies and doing it this way improves my chances.

Want to know more about the film? Check out the 'I Melt With You' clip Pellington posted on Vimeo a few months back. (via the comments on Deadline.) It features a monologue from a very bedraggled Thomas Jane, set against a variety of atmospheric clips. There's some of the same sensibility in this clip that drove me nuts in Pellington's last film, Henry Poole is Here. Can't say I'm wild about the idea of a full feature in this style, but it's likely (hopefully) wrong to assume this is representative of more than the film's tone. And I remain curious about what he'll do with a few actors on a small budget.