The Inspection Trailer: Jeremy Pope Stars In The A24 Drama Headed To TIFF
The trailer for A24's latest drama is here, and it's set to navigate some intense topics while telling a story inspired by the filmmaker's own life. "The Inspection" comes from writer-director Elegance Bratton ("Pier Kids"), and follows a young gay man who joins the Marines after being rejected by his mother as a teen. "Pose" and "One Night in Miami" star Jeremy Pope will play the main character, Ellis French, while "Bring it On" star Gabrielle Union plays his mother, Inez.
The movie will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, alongside other highly anticipated films like "Moonage Daydream" and "My Policeman." The full festival schedule goes live today. Check out the trailer for "The Inspection" below.
A 'remarkable debut'
The official TIFF synopsis for "The Inspection" is as follows:
Elegance Bratton's remarkable debut, a retelling of the filmmaker's own life story, follows a man (Jeremy Pope) who joins the Marine Corps after being thrown out of his mother's home at 16 for being gay and living for years in housing precarity.
This isn't the first time Bratton has pulled from his real life for a feature film. He also made "Pier Kids," a 2019 documentary spotlighting homeless queer and trans young people who spend time at Christopher Street Pier in Manhattan. That doc, too, was inspired by the filmmaker's life. In 2014, he told Yahoo about his journey from a homeless 16-year-old to a Marine to a Columbia University student, saying that while he was at Christopher Street, he "wasn't quite in a homeless shelter but wasn't sleeping indoors either."
"Both in the military and in my family home, I had to be very resourceful in creating double lives," Bratton told Yahoo, relaying the story of a violent incident that led to his family estrangement, and opening up about his time in the Marines before the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. All of this seems to have gone into "The Inspection," which has already secured A24 as its worldwide distributor ahead of TIFF, per Deadline.
It's been a while since stylish studio A24 has banked on an emotional drama like this, but it's an important story worth telling and looks like a perfect fit with the rest of the TIFF lineup. While the theatrical release for "The Inspection" is still forthcoming, A24 has already broken its own box office records this year with creative genre-bender "Everything Everywhere All At Once," and has also delivered plenty of striking conversation-starters like "X" and "Bodies Bodies Bodies."