Adam Driver and Miles Teller Get in Trouble with the Russian Mafia in the Paper Tiger Trailer

Beloved American filmmaker by cinephiles—especially for the quality of his films tied to a style and themes that have vanished, yet carried forward not with useless nostalgia but with stubborn dignity—James Gray takes us back with his cinematic time machine to the 1980s Queens, as he had done before in his previous Armageddon Time. But the story he tells in the new Paper Tiger, which will soon arrive in Italy with 01 Distribution, is very different from that bitter coming‑of‑age tale.
In his new film, presented in competition at Cannes, and then at several other festivals, Gray tells of two brothers, played by Adam Driver and Miles Teller: the first a megalomaniac ex‑policeman, bon viveur and schemer, the second a placid and somewhat naïve engineer, family man and owner of a small, family‑run business. Here the first presents himself to the second with an apparently perfect plan to make money by allying with a group of Russian émigrés who need technical consultancy for some of their projects, there is the illusion of wealth, and of course things go wrong, and the naïve engineer finds himself up to his neck in debt with the Russians, who are the mafia of their country come to the New World to do business.
Alongside Driver and Teller, also Scarlett Johansson (terrific), who after being the wife of the first in Marriage Story, here is the spouse of the second, a character far from secondary or marginal, despite certain demure appearances.
Paper Tiger, which does not yet have a release date in our country, will instead debut in November in the United States, at the height of awards season, and this is its official trailer.